Role of the State

Perhaps the most common ‘type’ of debate that you’re likely to encounter are debates about the role of the state.
To engage in these debates at a principled level, it is critically important to have a decent grasp of the different
theories concerning the proper role of government. It’s also important to appreciate that a commitment to a
particular view of government is very likely to be a practical function of an antecedent moral principle (e.g. those
committed to the principle of equal rights often favour judicial review in order to ensure that the majority cannot
curtail the rights of the minority). A solid foundation in moral theory, therefore, is also very valuable.

This post will go through a few typical “role of the state” or “nature of democracy” arguments and some common
objections to each of them. The theorists that each conception comes from are listed at the end of each theory,
together with some further reading.

The Minimal State – The Libertarian Argument

Worth noting before you read this is that it is an extremely radical position. It’s useful in debates like “THW
Abolish Income Tax” where you need to challenge the moral legitimacy of government itself. Beyond debates like
that, though, be wary of using this argument; it’s very hard to defend (see the objections below). In most cases
where you have to argue for a reduction in the role of government, you’re better to run with a general case for
freedom of choice and the reciprocally minimal role for government that that principle implies, rather than seek
the complete destruction of government.
1. •Individuals have a right to the property that they own and have acquired justly.
a. E.g. if I’ve bought a bag of shopping, I’ve made a sacrifice of money, have incurred a cost, and
therefore have the right to the fruits of the cost that I’ve incurred. It would be a violation of the rights
that I have in that property to seek to take it away from me. No-one else is entitled to it because
they’ve not made any sacrifices to acquire it.
2. •Similarly, a person is entitled to the proceeds of the property that they own because without sacrifice on
their part that property would never have existed.
a. E.g. if I’m running a business, my customer’s aren’t entitled to steal money from the till – only through
my labour did the revenue arise and no-one else is entitled to any of it.
3. •You own yourself.
a. The only conceivable person who has a property right in your person is you yourself.
4. •Therefore you have the right to all the proceeds of your labour.
a. You’re the person that made the sacrifices in order to earn that money, therefore it is only you that
may justifiably reap the rewards of the labour you’ve expended.
5. •Taxation, therefore, is akin to forced labour.
a. Most people would object to being forced to labour for some period of time for the sake of others.
b. But taxation is the equivalent of this – a particular proportion of the income that you make is literally
confiscated from you and redistributed.
6. •All the edifices of government are unjust because they have arisen out of an unjust state of affairs.
a. If it is unjust to raise tax it must also be unjust to use it to fund government initiatives. Therefore, the
very existence of all the institutions of government is unjust.
7. •The only exception to this principle are those services that, if individuals purchased for themselves in the
absence of a government, others would free-ride off and so exploit those who had paid.
a. E.g. if a group of people banded together and purchased a police service, the whole of society would
benefit, not merely those who had paid for it. Therefore, it seems reasonable to tax people to provide
that service. Such a police service would possibly also be linked up to a court system to enforce
contract laws (to make sure that everyone’s holdings are just). National defence would probably also
fall within this category.
8. •Objections
 a. The first objection targets the notion that no-one else is entitled to any of the proceeds of your labour.
The issue with saying this is that it ignores the fact that your success as an individual is only possible
in a social context, where the things that you’ve relied on for your success are communal goods. E.g.
If you’re selling electronics, you’re relying on a wide array of infrastructure (transport, electricity etc…)
that could only ever have been funded by individuals acting collectively. Moreover, selling electronics
relies upon a public that demands such things. Such a public is likely only to exist where that public is
sufficiently educated, probably through a system of public education. It seems reasonable then, that if
your income couldn’t really exist without the help of others, that others are entitled to some of the
fruits of your labour after all.
b. Moreover, the assumption that you’re entitled to all the income that you make carries with it the
assumption that the state of affairs that lead to you making that income in the first place was itself just.
The biggest factors in the level of income we make tend, ultimately, to be functions of things that we
weren’t in control of. Those who are highly educated and highly paid may have made the choice to go
to university and study finance, but the factors that meant that that choice was itself a realistic one
were probably unchosen. They were probably sent by their relatively wealthy parents to a good school
that was not of their choosing, are likely to have been brought up in a household where education was
valued. They were possibly born with a higher IQ, or possibly born with wealthier parents who could
afford to fund their education for them. None of these benefits they can be said to deserve in the
strong sense (i.e. they didn’t sacrifice anything in order to get their benefits in the first place).
Meanwhile, some people (e.g. the physically and mentally disabled, members of disadvantaged social
classes) similarly did not choose to lead a more difficult life. Neither, therefore, can it be said that they
deserve the life that they have. Something must be done; if you’re not entitled to your wealth, and
they’re not entitled to their poverty, that’s an unjust state of affairs that needs addressing. Solution Tax
the rich and redistribute (sophisticated [and awesome] account of arguments along these lines are
found in the work of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin).
c. Most modern societies are themselves built on top of great injustices (e.g. there’s a case to be made
that the Australian wealth depends upon the fact that the Aboriginal people were unjustly
dispossessed of their lands). If that’s the case, and you’re only entitled to property that you’ve
acquired justly, and the whole structure of modern society is built on injustices, it doesn’t seem like
there’s a whole lot that we’re actually entitled to.
d. Finally, libertarians simply neglect many things that we think are important. For instance, most people
accept that the right to freedom of choice is both very important for living a good life and requires that
we make authentic choices (choices that genuinely reflect the will of the individual). Making authentic
choices requires both basic psychological aptitude and knowledge about the world. You’re only going
to get either of those things where people are educated to a sufficient degree. Most individuals cannot
afford to set up their own school, nor pay for private education, but still think that freedom of choice is
central to living a good life; something we generally think everyone is entitled to. The only really viable
option is public education. Analogous arguments can be made concerning public health, sanitation
etc…
9. •Further Reading
a. Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2nd
Edition, 2002) 102.
i. An excellent commentary on libertarianism. The whole book is absolutely terrific!
b. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974).
i. The most well-known argument for libertarianism. Written in response to John Rawls’ A Theory
of Justice

The Choice Maximising State

This is a much more defensible view of a non-interventionist minimal state than Nozick’s libertarianism. It’s a bit
of a hodge-podge of different ideas from ethical theory that, taken together, have a reasonable degree of
currency in debaterland. The argument is essentially a fusion of this freedom of choice argument and Hobbesian
social contract theory. Just to be clear; the conclusion that I’ve drawn from this argument is one that Mill, whom
we’re friends with from our liberty argument, might be sympathetic to (though to be fair he’s not a contractarian)
but one that Hobbes would abhor.
1. •The Social Contract
a. The reason that government exists in the first place is because individuals tacitly recognise that there
is a mutual advantage to be had in surrendering certain liberties to a central government.
i. E.g. it’s obviously in everyone’s interest to surrender the personal capacity to inflict physical
harm to a government. Doing so guarantees that only legitimate bodies will be able to use force
and hopefully prevents everyone from being subject to arbitrary violence. That’s an obvious
mutual advantage.
b. The point here (or at least the point that you’d draw in a debate) is that only where there is a mutual
advantage in a particular action is the state allowed to act.
i. E.g. Passing a law banning the consumption of cod liver oil between 1AM and 5AM isn’t really to
anyone’s mutual advantage. Government, therefore, ought not create such a law.
2. •Mutual Advantage and Freedom of Choice
a. On this view, the laws the state is allowed to enforce turn primarily upon the question of what
constitutes mutual advantage.
b. At this point, it’s useful to borrow from the liberty argument.
c. The ultimate mutual advantage would consist in a society where everyone has the best possible
chance of achieving their own conception of the good life.
d. The individual is the entity with the greatest stake in their own welfare and is therefore the person
most likely to make decisions best calculated to lead them to the attainment of their conception of the
good.
e. Mutual advantage therefore consists in a state that continually expands the sphere of choice available
to its citizens, because in offering as much choice is possible, individuals are likely to be able to make
the best choices possible.
f. Note – you can also use this argument to defend democratic conceptions of government (e.g. mutual
advantage must be measured in terms of the benefits that it delivers for the population, therefore it
makes a lot of sense for the people to be in charge of the country [or at least in charge of appointing
representatives to be in charge of the country] they live in because they’re likely to insist upon policy
that best maximises their interests [probably by maximising their freedom of choice] and is, therefore,
to their mutual advantage). There are better arguments out there though.
3. •Objections
a. There never was a social contract. It’s just a thought experiment that doesn’t reflect reality.
b. This view leaves no room for moral principles. Indeed, as Kymlicka has argued (see further reading),
this view isn’t so much a moral view of governance as an alternative to a moral view of governance.
Mutual advantage could well be found in the exploitation of a particular underclass. There’s nothing on
this view to stop that happening because there are no moral principles to guide the actions of
government.
c. Moreover, mutual advantage won’t always mean maximal choice – e.g. national security is a matter of
mutual advantage, but requires secrecy, itself a restriction on choice because without complete
information, people can’t make completely informed choices.
4. •Further Reading
a. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1854). Available here: http://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/one.html.
b. Will Kymlicka, ‘The Social Contract Tradition’ (1991), in Peter Singer (ed), A Companion to Ethics
(Blackwell, 1991) 186.

Communitarianism
Communitarianism constitutes perhaps the most prominent challenge to mainstream liberal political philosophy.
The central claim of communitarians (or at least the communitarian argument we’ll explore here) is that whilst
liberals are right to care about individual autonomy, they ignore the fact that individuals can only really exercise
their autonomy in particular types of societies. The argument then goes on to claim that the liberal emphasis on
individual rights is the problem with modern societies – they seek to guarantee autonomy whilst all the time
undermining the social institutions and conventions essential to the realisation of that goal. The argument, more
formally, is as follows;
1. •Individual flourishing is a basic good and consists, approximately, in being able to make autonomous
choices concerning the types of lives that we want to lead and the moral and metaphysical beliefs that we
want to have about the world.
2. •The capacity for individual flourishing however, is only possible within communities.
3. •We can’t really make decisions about basic things like how we want to run our lives or distinguish between
right and wrong without reference to some kind of store of information and in a social context that makes us
feel secure enough to act upon whatever view of the good we wind up coming to. The only possible store of
information is the practices, norms, and institutions of the communities in which we live.
4. •These communities offer us valuable things like a stable set of options that we can choose between in
deciding how to live our lives, and a common way of life in which we can all share and from which we can
all draw vital conclusions concerning the manner in which we want to lead our lives.
5. •From these basic premises, a number of conclusions can be drawn concerning the role of the state. Here’s
just two.
a. The state is entitled to protect the community’s way of life. If the good lives of everyone in the
community hinge upon the strength of that community, the state ought to seek to protect that
community’s common form of life in order to guarantee the good lives of those who depend on the
community. It’s easy to see how this clashes with liberal ideas of individual rights – if we are able to
assert our individual rights against the good of the community, the community will be unable to sustain
its common form of life. For instance, the individual right to engage in prostitution could arguably be
said to undermine the community’s way of life by disrupting the norms that the community adheres to
in its consideration of sexual practices.
b. Charles Taylor has argued that the legitimacy of government hinges upon that government’s support
for the community’s common form of life.
i. Individual flourishing depends upon a stable society.
ii. A stable society in turn depends upon a stable political system.
iii. A stable political system is only possible where the individuals governed by that political system
view its authority as legitimate; only under such conditions will they voluntarily accept the
burdens that that government places upon them. If they don’t see the government itself as
legitimate, they won’t voluntarily follow its orders. Government becomes unstable, together with
society.
iv. Citizens will only see government as legitimate where they perceive that that government is in
pursuit of a supremely important good in which they themselves have a stake.
v. The only possible such good is the support of the common good of the community. In accepting
the burdens that government places on them in order to continue to support that common form
of life, individuals also serve their own interests, given that they depend on that community’s
strength for their own quality of life.
vi. The state, therefore, is entitled to override individual freedom of choice where doing so would
further the common good. Indeed a precondition of political legitimacy is its willingness to do so.
6. •Objections
a. The state that would be created on this view would be extremely invasive. If the state is entitled to
defend, at all costs, the community’s common form of life, it’s very likely that minorities will wind up
effectively being forced to “fit in” with what the majority wants of them (given that the ‘common form of
life’ in question is likely to simply be a function of the preferences of the majority). This seems an odd
way to build legitimacy with those with whom that state is likely to have the greatest imperative to
engage – minority groups.
 b. It’s also not clear why the government has the right to literally force individuals to conform with the
wishes of the majority. Just because the majority has a preference for something doesn’t give anyone
else the right to force it upon them.
c. There are many different types of goods that governments can pursue in order to build legitimacy.
i. Common principles of justice.
ii. National ideals.
iii. Community projects that do not require the curtailment of other practices.
7. •Further Reading
a. The work of the philosophers Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor.
i. I’ve unfortunately read little of either of their work on this aspect of communitarianism so I can’t
really give a decent direction as to what you should read – sorry!
b. As always, Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford University
Press, 2nd Edition, 2002), covers this issue with terrific clarity.
c. Ronald Dworkin’s book Sovereign Virtue also has a really good chapter in it on the communitarian
challenge to liberalism.

Equalitarian Liberal Democracy

1. •Democracy ought to be more than majoritarianism. The popularity of a particular policy does not determine
its moral justifiability.
a. E.g. segregation in America was wrong, despite its popularity.
2. •Nonetheless, governments acting directly contrary to the interests and wishes of the people over whom
they rule is also obviously undesirable (e.g. if the Australian government was to abolish public education,
that would be so contrary to the public interest and will we’d probably want to pronounce it illegitimate).
3. •A view of democracy is required that both permits the will of the majority to prevail in most circumstances,
whilst simultaneously preserving the rights of those who might suffer under majority rule.
a. In effect, we might think of this as a filter through which laws must pass. They’re prima facie legitimate
if they follow all the procedural rules we lay down for them, unless they contravene particular rules of
justice. Usually, liberals define these rules of justice in terms of rights.
4. •Ronald Dworkin has argued that we ought to think of democracy in terms of a partnership. Citizens in a
democratic state ought to be able to view their government as their own. Citizens in a democratic state
cannot see government in this way unless they see themselves as free and equal partners in that
government. Only a government such as this could be a legitimate government.
a. Equality requires that individuals be equal before the law and due process prevails. Laws must also
be general and not apply to specific individuals or groups on arbitrary grounds. Only under such
conditions is the use of force just. In any other circumstance it is inevitably the arbitrary use of
coercive measuring against non-consenting individuals.
b. Freedom requires that citizens be accorded a maximal possible liberty compatible with the same
degree of liberty for everybody else. This is a precondition of legitimacy because the individual is the
person best placed to judge what their conception of the good is and how they wish to pursue it; not
the state. Moreover, any attempt to restrict freedom to engage in private conduct (i.e. conduct that
doesn’t violate anyone else’s interests that we have a duty to respect) must inevitably be arbitrary and
violate the principle of equality. The state has no special capacity to choose between different
conceptions of the good, and it’s not clear why it has the right to do so.
5. •Where government violates either freedom or equality, therefore, it acts illegitimately.
6. •The Role of Courts
a. Democratic legitimacy requires limits to be placed upon legislative bodies. Any majoritarian institution
left unconstrained will eventually violate the principles of either freedom or equality.
 b. The virtue of courts with the power to review decisions therefore is clear – they are a
counter-majoritarian institution that works to preserve both values. Legitimate democracy requires
constitutional limits on power that can only be enforced by a body ambivalent to the wishes of the
majority. An independent court is the only possible entity that could fulfil that role.
7. •Objections – see all the other theories above!

Theories of Rights
Introduction
Modern human rights discourse has done much to advance equality, expand liberty and curb the excesses of
government. As such, rights discourse frames many public debates. To raise just one example, far-right American
conservatives insist that the state must have the right to torture terror suspects when in pursuit of high security
objectives. Liberals object that torture violates victims’ rights to bodily integrity and dignity together with the right
to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. What are the limits of rights and when can we abridge them The
answers lie in an analysis of differing theories of rights. We shall focus on two theories likely to be familiar to most
law students – Kantianism (deontology) and Utilitarianism.
Before discussing those theories, however, it is first useful to define what a “right” is. Isaiah Berlin defines rights
in terms of positive liberties and negative freedoms. A positive right is an entitlement to. A right to free
expression, for instance, entitles one to voice opinions publicly. A negative right is a freedom from. Freedom of
person is a right to be free of bodily interference. Most rights are both positive and negative. An entitlement to
engage in particular conduct usually implies a reciprocal freedom from interference when doing so.

Utilitarianism
For the utilitarian, the just action is that which, relative to all other possible actions, maximises utility or “the good”
(defining “the good” is the subject of philosophical conjecture and beyond our scope here). This is the utility
principle. Utilitarianism is exclusively consequentialist; the justice or injustice of an action or state of affairs is
determined exclusively by the consequences it brings about. If an action maximises utility, it is just. On this
account, therefore, rights are purely instrumental. It is also worth noting that many in the utilitarian tradition have
expressed hostility to the notion of rights of any sort. Jeremy Bentham (the founder of modern utilitarianism) once
referred to them as “nonsense on stilts”. Nonetheless, modern rule utilitarians will generally accept the right to
bodily autonomy, for instance, not for any reason intrinsic to human beings, but rather because, in acknowledging
that right, individuals can be assured of the personal safety necessary for pursuing a good life. This is an optimal
consequence and therefore desirable.
The utilitarian will honour a right if and only if it will lead to the maximisation of utility. This statement also
indicates the limits of all rights. If the exercise of a particular will not maximise utility, the utilitarian is obligated to
violate that person’s rights for the sake of utility. The point at which the letter of the right defeats the purpose (i.e.
the point at which the exercise of a particular right will not maximise utility) is the point at which society may justly
curtail that right.
Prima facie, this approach is very commonsensical. It seems intuitive enough that most things, let alone rights,
are only worthwhile if they do some good. For instance, no reasonable person would argue that the right to free
expression extends to the production, distribution or consumption of child pornography. The harm done to
children in its production, together with the social harms brought about through the sexualisation of children, far
outweigh the perverse pleasure that paedophiles experience in viewing it. Given that it does not maximise utility,
the right to free expression cannot support child pornography. The law should reflect that conclusion.
Rights are limited by the utility principle. If the exercise of a right maximises the good, the right ought to hold. If it
fails to do so, the right may be justly abridged.
Opponents of the utilitarian account of rights argue that in some cases it extends rights too far and in other cases
it restricts rights unjustly. To return to the child pornography example, it is perfectly possible that a perverse adult
with the intent to make child pornography could guarantee that only one child would be harmed in a particular
production. Furthermore, he could plausibly guarantee an extremely wide circulation. A great number of adults
will experience pleasure. Only one child experiences pain. The utilitarian calculus may well reflect the adults’
pleasure outweighing the child’s pain. In such a circumstance, the utilitarian must limit the child’s right to bodily
integrity and favour the adults’ right to free expression. This is obviously intolerable. There is no circumstance in
which we ought to tolerate such exploitation. As Kymlicka observes, an independent theory of fairness is needed
to determine the limits of what can be demanded of others for our own benefit.

Kantianism (Deontology)
Kantianism, by contrast, is an explicitly non-consequentialist ethic. Kant believed that the consequences of our
actions are often determined by contextual factors beyond the control of the individual. Honour and blame are
only coherent notions where the subject is responsible for what they have done. In all appeals to consequences,
the locus of responsibility must necessarily be displaced to a broad array of factors, only one part of which is the
agency of the individual in question. Moral responsibility for consequence, therefore, is incoherent. Morality must
be a matter of intentions, these being the only things we can evaluate without extrinsic influence. The right action
therefore is that which is done in conformity with our moral duty, regardless of consequence.
But what are those duties In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant argued that one ought to “act
only according to that maxim whereby [one] can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” In
other words – our own conduct is only ever just if we can in all conscience will that every other person acted the
same way. In the same work, he also declared that one should “…treat humanity… never merely as a means to
an end, but always at the same time as an end.” Similarly, our conduct is only just if, in acting, we do not use any
other person as a tool to achieve our own objectives. Speaking generally, our moral duty is to only act where our
actions satisfy the two tests outlined – universalisability and the ends/means requirement. Kantians, for instance,
believe that you have an absolute duty to tell the truth. Lying fails the universalisability test because if everyone
lied the notion of truth (something we value very highly) would become worthless. Similarly it fails the
ends/means test because when we lie we are attempting to deceive another person for our own ends; that’s
treating them as a means rather than an end in themselves as so cannot be just.
The human rights implications follow fairly intuitively. Human rights are principles of justice that seek to guarantee
that individuals are treated always as ends in themselves, and ought to apply universally, regardless of the
consequences. To return to the child pornography example, the child’s right to bodily autonomy (and the
reciprocal duty of everyone else to respect that right) establish the wrongness of the action in question. Violating
the child’s right to autonomy has resulted in treating that child as a means to others’ pleasure and could hardly be
considered a universalisable action. The action is wrong, therefore, based upon the intrinsic rights of the child,
not based upon a consequentialist calculus.
Rights therefore can only be limited where the exercise of the right in question is one that is non-universalisable
or where it would lead to treating another as a means, not as an end in themselves.
Utilitarians respond that whilst their moral theory might require exploitation, it is at least superior to a total
disregard for consequences. Kant himself raises the following example. Suppose that a friend knocks on your
door late at night and begs you to hide them because a murderer is after them. You admit them. The murderer
then knocks on your door and asks you if your friend is at your house. You are obliged to answer truthfully, even if
doing so will result in your friend’s death. Lying to the murderer would violate the duty outlined above to always
tell the truth. This, again, seems absurd. The murderer must surely forfeit their right to be treated as an end in
themselves when their objectives will lead to such a horribly immoral consequence. Our actions do not only affect
ourselves; they also have consequences for others. Those consequences are of moral significance and deserve
to be considered as a part of the moral calculus.

Applications
Which theory of rights one accepts will determine one’s view of rights-based issues. Consider the issue of torture.
Imagine that a terrorist has planted a bomb in a full stadium. Security services have captured the terrorist. The
terrorist has refused to reveal the location of the bomb. Police have searched in vain. Psychiatric assessments
reveal (with absolute accuracy) that if the terrorist is tortured he will divulge the information. Plainly, the terrorist’s
rights to autonomy and bodily integrity are at stake. Both the Kantian and the utilitarian have obvious answers.
The utilitarian would sacrifice the terrorist’s rights to save the lives of thousands. The pain the terrorist will
experience will be far outweighed by the good of preventing the deaths of thousands. The Kantian, with an
explicit disregard for consequences, must refuse to torture the terrorist. Violating the terrorist’s rights makes him
a means to our ends (regardless of how altruistic our ends might be). Further, it is clearly undesirable to allow
violations of integrity or autonomy universally. Analogous issues are manifold. Banning a particular religious sect
known for occasionally singing very loudly late a night and keeping entire suburbs awake might increase
everyone’s happiness overall, but would obviously treat those individuals as a means to our own end of peace of
mind. Ought we violate the right to religious freedom Confiscating all the property of an extremely wealthy person
and redistributing it to the poor would certainly promote social utility but treat the wealth man as a means to our
end of creating a more equal society. Ought we violate the rich’s property rights

Conclusion
The answers to rights-based moral questions depend almost exclusively upon which account of rights one
accepts. Engaging with the theory behind human rights is therefore critical to developing coherent policy
positions.
Liberty
Arguments about liberty (or freedom of choice [or better yet, luberty]) are some of the most common you’ll
encounter in debating. Everything from debates about legalising or banning practices to debates about foreign
aid can touch on freedom of choice questions. The view of freedom of choice I’m going to cover here is pretty
close to the view John Stuart Mill presents in On Liberty (link below). This is the view that is most often advanced
by debaters and as such it’s a good one to be familiar with. As always though, there are plenty of theories out
there on this stuff and plenty of alternate views to check out! I’m first going to plot out the typical argument in
favour of freedom of choice (or at least, a typical argument in favour of it). Then I’ll raise a few ideas about where
freedom of choice might be limitable on this view. The arguments here advanced are for the purposes of
demonstration and do not reflect my own views, or the views of the Debating Society.

A Typical Argument for Liberty

1. Premise 1: maximal individual flourishing is a basic moral good.
a. Flourishing can be a tricky notion to define. Generally a person that is flourishing is leading a “good
life”. What a good life consists in, however, is a matter of ferocious debate amongst academics. Does
a good life, for instance, require us to have a rational, well-defined idea of what we want our life to be
like, or does it merely mean being happy as much of the time as possible Might it instead be satisfying
our preferences, whether or not they make us happy, or might it instead be that a good life consists in
living in a community in whose collective projects we share Either way, you’re (fortunately) unlikely to
have to enter this particular philosophical quagmire. In the majority of debates, it’s probably enough to
just say that individuals leading a “good life” is an end in itself. What that good life is, for this argument
anyway, is best defined by the individual, not by the state.
2. Premise 2: a good life requires that the choices that are made concerning an individual’s life resemble as
closely as possible what that individual would choose for themselves.
a. A good life requires that the individual be able to make choices that match their preferences as closely
as possible. If they are unable to do so, it’s likely that they’ll be dissatisfied with the way their life is
going and, probably, cannot plausibly be said to be leading a “good life”.
3. Premise 3: the individual is the entity with the greatest stake in their own welfare. They are also the person
best placed to decide what is best for themselves.
a. That is, the individual is the person most likely to be affected by the consequences of their choices
and is therefore the entity most likely to make the best choice from the perspective of their own
wellbeing. They’re the entity that stands to lose the most if they choose badly and stands to gain the
most if they choose well.
b. Moreover, because the individual has the best appreciation of what they want (i.e. the only person
who can know with accuracy the preferences of an individual is that individual themselves) they’re
also the person best placed to make those decisions.
4. 4.Conclusion: because flourishing is an important moral good, and because achieving that flourishing
requires that the choices made concerning an individual’s life be as close as possible the choices that
person themselves would make, and because the person whose choices are most likely to reflect the will of
that individual are the individual’s themselves (because they are likely to have the greatest stake in the
consequences of those choices), we ought to have a strong presumption in favour of freedom of choice.

What Is Liberty

Freedom of choice, like almost all individual rights, can be understood both positively (as a right to freedom of
choice) and negatively (as a right to be free from interference in one’s choices).

The negative aspect of freedom of choice is fairly straightforward. A person has negative freedom of choice if
they are free from direct, coercive constraints on their behaviour (banning things is a good example here –
passing a law to ban the consumption of meat pies on Wednesdays is a good example of a law that would restrict
negative freedom of choice). We might also extend this by saying that it’s also important that a person feels as
though they are free from such restraints. A common argument in favour of acknowledging a right to privacy, for
instance, is that if a person feels as though they are permanently under surveillance (even if they are not in fact),
they’re unlikely choose as freely. This is because they’re likely to feel as though their choices will be judged by
others, may be made public or even render them subject to sanction. The inevitable result is self-cenorship
(where a person chooses to act less freely and less publicly than they might otherwise have for fear of being
subject to arbitrary acts of offense or harm). That functionally undermines their capacity to choose and thus the
degree to which that person is living a flourishing life.

The positive aspect of freedom of choice is more complex. Saying that someone has a right to choose obviously
implies a right to do certain things certain contexts. I have a right to have Scotch whisky on my cornflakes in the
morning, even if others might think it a strange choice. However, it is also important to consider the quality of the
choices in question. If a person, for instance, is not aware of all possible choices (or if certain choices were not
open to him because of a prohibition), he may not choose what is best for himself. The option he might have
chosen might have been one of the ones he wasn’t aware of (or one of the options that was prohibited).

To offer a more concrete example, a person that grows up on a very strict religious commune, and has received
all their guidance and education from and with those within the community, is unlikely to be aware of all the
possible options open to them in life because the social conditions in which they’ve grown up have conditioned
them both to accept particular things unquestioningly and have restricted the knowledge that they have of the
outside world. What is the quality of that individual’s positive right to freedom of choice Though there’s no
physical restraint on him (i.e. he could probably walk out the gates of the commune tomorrow and never return),
he faces enourmous psychological limitations. For instance, a person who has never been made aware of the
existence of other forms of religious belief hasn’t really made a choice to believe; rather, they lack the capacity to
question because they’ve been manipulated into not doing so. The right to choose freely doesn’t meaningfully
exist or is at least severly impaired in this instance.

The extent to which we have a right to freedom of choice is always to a certain extent determined of
environmental factors. Social conditions can influence our psychological states (oppressive social conditions are
likely to limit what we take to be possible), and can restrict our choices more conventionally (in certain societies, it
is oppressively difficult to be openly transgender, either because it’s illegal, or because there’s a strong social
norm in place that disapproves of it). Just as importantly, the family environment we’re raised in, our genetic
disposition, the groups of friends that we have etc… can all influence the extent to which we can exercise our
freedom of choice. Given this, many liberals therefore support a broad array of freedom-maximising social
programmes that seek to give the individual the capacity to make free choices. Some examples;
1. Public education. Choice requires knowledge, school gives knowledge.
2. Public health. Choice requires the physical capacity to choose. The only proper guarantor of that physical
capacity is if there is a reliable public health system to which people can turn if they’re suffering from ill
health. They can get better and get back to leading their (hopefully good) lives. The thought that you might
become irreversibly ill will restrict the choices you’ll make (e.g. you’d never do a job that was in any way
dangerous if you thought that you’d have no chance of recovering from any injury you might sustain) –
hence public health.
3. Policing. If we all thought we might be subject to arbitrary violence at any point, we’d again not make
particular choices; police protect our freedom to choose.

Two final things to note here. Firstly, you don’t need to step through the positive/negative stuff in debates; it’s just
a useful way of analysing the right in the abstract. Rather, do the analysis as to the importance of freedom of
choice, then show why a particular social policy will either expand or restrict freedom of choice in a positive or
negative respect. Secondly, these arguments are essential for debaters and have plenty of currency. The way to
make them more persuasive though is not to just defend the right of individuals to make choices generally and
use that argument to support of the policy at stake in the debate, but also to defend the value of that policy
relative to the specific individuals at stake in the debate. For instance, in the topic that we should legalise
voluntary active euthanasia, it would make sense to run this freedom of choice argument to justify the right to be
euthanised on the grounds that a person is entitled to develop and pursue their own conception of the good life. It
would also make a lot of sense to defend the positive value of a right to euthanasia to the good life of an
individual (the importance of self-determination, the subjective value that people place upon dignity, the
importance of giving autonomy to the elderly etc…). In this way you show that the principles of liberty not only
ground a right to euthanasia, but also render that right a particularly desirable one.

When Can We Limit Freedom of Choice

There are obvious cases where we legitimately limit freedom of choice. We put people in prison, force people to
not to harm others, restrict access to child pornography etc… However, intuition is rarely ever enough in debates.
What’s obviously needed is some principled analysis concerning the limits upon the choices we can make.

The bread and butter restriction upon freedom of choice is always where your conduct harms others, the basic
intuition being that it’s obviously unjust for your actions to arbitrarily undermine other people’s legitimate interests.
But what is harm This is another philosophical problem that you’ll either find fascinating or infuriating depending
on your perspective. Given that, I’ll offer just one (I think quite plausible) definition. A person causes harm if their
conduct leaves others worse off than they would otherwise have been. There are at least three ways that you
might do this;
1. Direct Harm (physical harm or a specific act that causes psychological harm to another) – where your
conduct directly impinges upon someone else’s quality of life. For instance, striking someone in the face will
restrict their freedom to choose options that don’t involve seeking medical attention in a very short space of
time. Strike them hard enough and they might suffer permanent damage, enough to change their prospects
in life. Either way, you’ve damaged their quality of life and your behaviour can justly be curtailed. In the
same way, indoctrinating someone into believing something restricts their freedom of choice is what might
be called direct psychological harm.
2. Indirect harm – where your conduct does not directly harm another, but creates social conditions harmful to
another. Here’s a typical feminist argument against pornography that relies upon the idea of indirect harm.
The production of pornography need not harm anyone. Its consumption is also unlikely to hurt anyone.
However, the social conditions created by a society that widely consumes pornography are likely to leave at
least some women worse off than they might otherwise have been. This is because the social attitudes
promoted by pornography, and a society that widely consumes it, lends legitimacy to the view that women
are sex objects that ought to be subservient to men. The making of pornography thus indirectly causes
harm.
a. This is a far more controversial category and is obviously more difficult to prove. For instance x is a
man, employed by a women’s rights NGO who performs well in their job. In the evenings, they
occasionally watch pornography. Can it really be said that I should be punished for the social
conditions pornography creates
b. Or, y a racist, often leans out his car windows and shouts offensive slurs at members of a particular
minority. However, that minority also has consistently received extremely unfavourable news
coverage, has been the subject of talkback radio ire. Individuals from that minority are also socially
disadvantaged. Ought we punish y for that social disadvantage If we were to do so, it seems as
though we’d have to punish a whole lot of people – everyone involved in the news coverage (who
might just have been reporting facts), everyone who called in to talkback radio, presumably everyone
who just agrees with the negative social perception of that minority because that in itself feeds the
unfavourable status quo. It seems as though we might be lead to punishing too many people on this
view.
c. Indirect harm arguments can work very well. However, it is essential that you prove very closely the
links between the conduct and the social conditions, and in turn the link between the social conditions
and harm
3. Failing in one’s obligations to society. You might not want to pay tax. Sorry; everyone else’s good life is in
some way contingent upon everyone agreeing to pay taxes to support a central government. You’re
therefore obligated to bear your part of the tax burden because if you don’t, you’ll lower the amount of
money that government has to spend on the collective good. In doing so, you leave everyone worse off
than they would otherwise have been. On that basis, therefore, we’re happy to force you to pay tax.

Where choices are made that exclusively concern the individual, things get more difficult. There are of course
plenty of moral theories that are happy to just throw out the argument I outlined above and just make choices for
people. Communitarianism and Marxism are two theories worth a look if you’re interested (follow this link to a
blog post that deals with communitarianism). I won’t consider them here, however. I’ll instead consider one of the
premises in the basic argument. We earlier argued that the individual had the greatest stake in their own welfare
and was therefore the person best placed to make choices concerning their own life with a view to maximising
their long-term prospects of leading a flourishing life. The final part of the argument is the most important –
individual flourishing is the basic good. Freedom of choice is only worthwhile because we assume it’s the best
way to achieve that good. If we can establish that there are some circumstances where intervention, either by the
state or some other actor, would better lead to individual flourishing, we’re obligated on the basis of the original
argument itself to restrict freedom.

So another good, generic test for the restriction of freedom of choice is: “does the person in question have the
capacity to judge what would be in their best interests” If the answer to that is no, and some other body is better
placed to make that judgement, you’ve a prima facie case for coercion. Here are some examples. All of these
examples are controversial and do not necessarily reflect what I personally believe. They only reflect arguments
that it is possible to defend in a debating context.
1. •People with severe mental dysfunction. Certain severe psychological disorders mean that individuals
literally lack the capacity to evaluate the consequences of their choices. They therefore lack the capacity to
do the calculus required to determine whether something is or is not in the interests of their welfare. As
such, a degree of coercion is permissible, provided that that coercion is more likely to lead to that
individual’s flourishing than the choices that individual might make themselves.
a. For an example, consider the ANU Spring 2011 debate about forcing the severely mentally ill to be
institutionalised. In that debate, to run this argument, you needed to;
i. Establish the usual basis for freedom of choice (above).
ii. Explain the principled justification for limiting freedom of choice (above) where there’s no harm
to anyone else.
iii. Establish why the severely mentally disabled lack the capacity to choose what would be in their
best interests.
iv. Establish why the state can do a better job than anyone else at making those choices. Bear in
mind that this didn’t just require differentiating from the individual themselves, but also from
other care they might be receiving; e.g. care from family members.
2. •Children generally lack the degree of rationality required to make decisions in their own best interests.
Therefore we defer to parents and when they fail at the task, we defer to the state.
3. •People with temporary mental deficiencies. It’s (arguably) a good thing when the police lock up severely
intoxicated people and let them go in the morning. Even if they’ve done no harm to anyone else, giving
them somewhere safe to go stops them hurting themselves in a way that they might have if they were left to
their own devices.

Countervailing analysis though can be found in the work of (the eternally useful) Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin argues
that the efficacy of state paternalism is limited by the “endorsement constraint”. The idea here is that where the
state forces individuals to engage in particular “valuable activities”, it is unlikely to be successful. A person who
voluntarily attends the opera is likely to find their life enriched by it; it’s activity that brings them happiness, the
themes of the opera might prompt personal reflection upon their own life, it might be a valuable form of social
commentary etc… However, that individual is only able to access what is valuable in opera because they have
chosen to attend. They are able to take value from the opera, because they themselves take it to be valuable;
hence their attendence. A person who is coerced to attend the opera, though they will experience the same
performance, is unlikely to take value from it, precisely because they are not attending voluntarily, and so are
unlikely to recognise the opera as a source of value for them. They’re unlikely to be receptive to the value that
they might otherwise have taken from the opera. The state presumably was coercing that person to attend in
order that they might adopt some of the values from it. They will not do so, however, because they will not
suppose it to be a valuable activity, and so will not be receptive to any value within it.

Finally, here’s some really useful analysis concerning conflicts in preferences. I’ve simplified and modified the
argument, but the more complex basis of it is based on: Robert E. Goodin, ‘Permissible Paternalism: Saving
Smokers From Themselves’ in LaFollete (ed), Ethics in Practice, an Anthology (2nd Edition, Blackwell 2002) 307.
The theory suggests that we have long-term preferences and short-term preferences. Ideally, we use our
long-term preferences to organise our short-term preferences. For instance, our long-term preference might be to
become a lawyer. Our short-term preference is therefore to attend university and become a lawyer. We could also
say that leading a flourishing life consists in maximising as many of our long-term preferences as possible.
Ideally, our short-term preferences are a means to our long term ones. Therefore, where there’s a conflict
between our short-term and our long-term preferences, we’re undermining our own flourishing and the state is
entitled to intervene.
Example: we ban duels to the death. We’ve all got a long-term preference to live long and healthy lives. Our
short-term preference might be to satisfy a demand for satisfaction, but as we’re likely to die we can say that it is
reasonably likely to conflict with long-term preferences. Therefore, the practice should be banned.

Notice again how this justification turns on the fact that freedom of choice is only good if it actually leads to the
outcome of people leading flourishing lives. If it doesn’t, it seems as though curtailing that freedom of choice is a
reasonable thing to do, provided that curtailing it is likely to yield a better chance of maximal flourishing than the
choice itself.

Autonomy
Many debates will raise the issue of autonomy. For instance, in a debate about euthanasia, an obvious
consideration is the extent to which legalising euthanasia would or would not maximise the autonomy of the
patient. It’s obviously useful, therefore, to have a decent grasp of the idea. As you read through, you’ll see that
there are obvious links to liberty. In many respects, they’re two sides of the same coin. Both typically (though not
always) take individual flourishing as their main objective. Freedom of choice seeks the absence of coercive
restrictions upon individuals. Autonomy seeks the positive capacity to develop and pursue a conception of the
good. Both are essential in the pursuit of a flourishing life.

At a more philosophical level, a good way of thinking about the dichotomy of freedom of choice and autonomy is
in terms of the strength of the concepts. Freedom of choice is a relatively weak concept – it basically implies a
right to be free from interference in one’s pursuit of particular choices in life. It’s obviously possible to make it a
thicker concept if you want (e.g. that if we care about freedom of choice we ought obviously also care about the
quality of the choices in question and therefore favour choice-maximising social programmes like education
etc…) but the heart of the concept will always be negative – that we ought to be free to pursue our choices.
Autonomy, however, is a stronger concept. Though definitions are myriad, a popular liberal one is that autonomy
the capacity to rationally develop and pursue a conception of the good. This implies more than negative liberty. It
implies a positive right to actually achieve rational reflection and one’s conception of the good – to make and
enact “laws” for oneself. In many formulations it also places a heavy emphasis on reason (this is particularly true
of the Kantian account). Choices made on impulse aren’t truly autonomous choices because there’s no element
of deliberation involved; no concsious decision to make a particular choice. As such, we’re effectively not making
a law for ourselves, we’re just responding to impulses over which we have no control. True autonomy requires
deliberation concerning what we want for ourselves at a rational level, not what we want on impulse. This is in
contrast to freedom of choice, which can be defended without any appeal to the rational basis for the choices in
question.

1. •The importance of autonomy is not settled. A good general idea though is that;
a. Autonomy is the capacity for self-government. That is, autonomy is the capacity to rationally develop
and pursue a conception of the good.
i. One important thing to note is that autonomy is not a binary state – one is not either fully
autonomous or entirely non-autonomous. See below for more.
b. That’s obviously of central concern for all moral theories. It is an incontrovertible moral good that
individuals grow to lead flourishing lives. Lives that flourish are lives that are chosen freely and
independently by the individual who leads the life in the first place and lived in accordance with that
individual’s wishes. Autonomy is the capacity to reason with oneself to make those choices and to
pursue them in the world.
c. The only reasonable basis for a government to exist is if it maximises the chances of the individuals
within it leading good lives, relative to the possibility of having no government. If autonomy is central
to leading a good life, government ought therefore maximise the autonomy of individuals, within the
bounds of the rules of justice (e.g. you can freely think what you like about your neighbours and,
indeed, orient your entire life around a hatred of them, provided that you don’t violate any duties that
you owe them [i.e. don’t harm them]).
2. •Thus, governments ought to maximise autonomy. Governments guided by liberal principles typically do so
in a number of ways;
a. Instigating and enforcing a regime of personal moral rights (e.g. the right to life) to protect the basic
preconditions of negative liberty required for an individual to pursue their conception of the good.
 i. E.g. if we were all subject to random violence regularly, we’d all be to scared to go out and
pursue our conceptions of the good. Therefore, the state protects a right to bodily integrity to
guarantee that we’re not hampered by the illegitimate desires in our own pursuit of the good.
b. Instigating particular autonomy-maximising social programmes such as public education. The reason
we like autonomy is so that individuals can choose a life pattern that best reflect their preferences.
However, if those preferences are informed only by very limited information, or if the person in
question has only a limited competency to evaluate those preferences, it’s unlikely that they will in fact
choose a life pattern that truly maximises their preferences. They’ll fail either through ignorance or
lack of skill and choose less well than they might have had they been better informed or more
competent. Public education, along with other programmes, maximise autonomy. When people make
informed choices, they are more autonomous; both in the sense that they have a greater capacity to
critique different moral and practical ideas, and in the sense that they are more informed when they
act. They are therefore likely to exercise their autonomy in a fashion ultimately more in line with their
preferences. They can thus be said to be more autonomous.
c. Maintaining particular social safety nets like public health. Individuals would be unlikely to consider
particular conceptions of the good, or try and pursue them, if they thought that if they suffered harm in
doing so, it would vitiate all their future prospects in life. They would thus be unable to develop a
conception of the good truly in line with their preferences and lead a more impoverished life as a
result. Social safety nets like public health intercede by guaranteeing that if individuals suffer harm
during their lives, such harm is likely to be temporary and won’t ruin their prospects in life. They’ll then
be able to develop and pursue a conception of the good more freely and therefore, be more
autonomous.
3. •The Argument from Recognition
a. Anderson and Honneth (see article referenced below; it’s a really great read if you’re interested!)
make the interesting argument that whether someone is autonomous is not a binary question. One is
not either autonomous or non-autonomous. Rather autonomy is an emergent property; a set of
learned behaviours that, taken together, endow an individual to rationally develop and pursue a
conception of the good.
b. They then go on to observe that some of the behaviours without which we cannot have autonomy
(self-respect, self-trust, and self-esteem) are deeply influenced by our relations with others.
i. Self-respect;
i. Self-respect is the capacity to make and defend claims about the world publicly. This can
be seen both as the capacity to enter public discourse in a political sense to attempt to
influence policy, and in a more personal sense. Pursuing a conception of the good will
almost inevitably involve some sort of conduct in public. In being seen in public, one tacitly
makes a statement about what one considers good or valuable in life through ones
conduct etc…
ii. Self-respect is thus central to autonomy because if we lack self-respect we’ll be totally unwilling
to publicly pursue our conceptions of the good. It is of course possible to pursue a conception of
the good completely privately, but it would a totally impoverished conception of the good and
abhorrent to most people.
i. Self-respect is, in many respects, a function of our relations with others. If we live in a
permissive society where individuals are willing to entertain different conceptions of the
good and different political ideas, we’ll feel comfortable appearing in public and entering
political discourse. If we live in a society that represses minorities and treats them with
ridicule, those from beyond the majority will lack self-respect because they will feel unable
to make and defend claims about the world, either in the political or personal sense. Their
autonomy is thus impaired by the conduct of others.
iii. Self-trust;
i. Self-trust is the capacity to trust one’s own intuitions and desires and incorporate them into
one’s conception of the good.
 ii. The basic thought here is that we have to get our ideas about what kind of a life we want
to lead from somewhere. Some of those ideas will come from reason, others will come
simply from intuitions.
iii. In order to lead an authentically autonomous life (a life that genuinely reflects our
preferences) we need to be able to act on those intuitions.
iv. In order to do so, we need to trust that those intuitions are both in our interests and are
worth following.
v. Developing that self-trust is a matter of a supportive interpersonal environment, whereby
the love and support of others empowers us to treat our intuitions with sufficient regard.
vi. We need evidence, if you like, that our intuitions and thoughts are worthwhile. The only
place we can get it is from others because they’re the only place that we can get
“feedback” from.
vii. Thus relationships are critical to self-trust and self-trust is critical to autonomy.
iv. Self-esteem
i. Self-esteem is about the extent to which we view our projects in life as valuable. A person
who sees what they do as valuable is likely to commit to it to a far greater extent than a
person who does not. That then means that that person is never likely to fully experience
the life that they have chosen for themselves. In the process they will neither fulfil their
rational preferences, nor know whether that life was truly the life that they would have
chosen for themselves.
ii. Our self-esteem is also largely a function of social relations. When we pursue our
conceptions of the good, we do so in a public sphere where others inevitably evaluate our
actions. The manner in which they choose to express their evaluation must necessarily
impact upon our self esteem. If our projects are publicly ridiculed and denigrated, we’re
likely to perceive our life choices as less valuable. Conversely, if society is supportive
different life patterns, we are likely to feel as though our social roles are valuable and
commit to them more wholeheartedly.
iii. In this way, autonomy depends upon self-esteem and self-esteem depends upon the
extent to which society treats our choices in life as valuable and protects our public dignity.
c. If we accept that autonomy ought to be maximised, and that autonomy depends at least in part upon
our relations with others, it seems as though if it could be demonstrated that government intervention
in interpersonal relations would secure conditions of maximal self-esteem, self-respect and self-trust,
government is obligated to pursue those actions.
d. The Honneth and Anderson article concludes that a radical revision of rights-based justice is needed;
we ought to supplement moral rights with a focus on improving intersubjective relations. That would
be a difficult thesis to sustain in a debate and turns upon a quirky, Marxist critique of liberal rights so
we won’t discuss it here. Debaterland conclusions that could be drawn from this analysis, however,
include;
i. Free speech regulations, especially debates dealing with the protection of vulnerable groups like
minorities and women.
ii. State support for particular minority practices as a guarantor of individuals within that minority’s
self esteem, trust and respect etc…
iii. State neutrality in matters of the good (if the state intervenes in matters of the good, certain
individuals will inevitably lose out as government lends legitimacy to certain practices and
implicitly delegitimises others).
iv. The importance of guaranteeing rights. We need rights like freedom of association to guarantee
that everyone has the capacity to sustain the meaningful relationships essential to autonomy.
4. •Note: it could also be interesting to try and dovetail this analysis with the speech act argument that
particular acts of expression legitimate forms of discrimination and rank certain social groups as inferior
(see Rights – Freedom of Speech – Speech Acts). In doing both those things, the relations between
 individuals must necessarily be affected, with adverse affects to their self-esteem, respect and trust. By
extension, then, an adverse illocutionary act could be shown to limit the autonomy of particular agents.

Duties
Establishing that a duty arises on the part of a particular actor is perhaps the most common type of principled
argument that a debater will have to make. Almost all debates concern the conduct of particular actors (parents,
the state, corporations, nations, international institutions etc…) and their impact upon particular stakeholders
(children, the population at large, shareholders, minority groups, poor states etc…). Where those actors cause
harm, a duty arises on the part of the actor to undertake particular actions compensating that stakeholder and to
abstain from causing future harm. Depending upon the actor (often in debates where government is concerned) a
positive duty may also arise to confer some benefit upon a stakeholder, independent of any “guilty conduct” on
the part of the actor. The general form of a duty argument is very simple: “given x, A has a duty to B to do y.” In
this post I’ll briefly explain why arguments from and to moral duties have such force in debates. I’ll then go
through the typical structure of a duty argument. Finally I’ll discuss proportionality and conflicts in duties. I’ll
provide practical examples throughout. Please leave a comment or get in touch if anything’s unclear! As always,
all positions adopted here are for the purposes of example only and reflect neither my personal views, nor the
view of the Macquarie University Debating Society.

Why Are Moral Duties Important in Debates

There are at least three reasons why duty arguments are often important in debates. I don’t pretend that these
are the only reasons why duty arguments are important, or that everyone will agree with the reasons that I have
given (especially the second). Nonetheless; here they are.

The first and most obvious reason is common to all principled arguments (or at least all non-utilitarian principled
arguments); they trump consequentialist arguments. Intuitively, it is morally impermissible for a state of affairs to
be adjusted by morally impermissible means. The violation of a duty is, ordinarily, morally impermissible. As such,
a consequentialist argument that violates a moral duty is unacceptable (note that I mean this in a principled
sense; in a debate, a team can of course win the principled argument but still lose the debate on consequentialist
arguments, depending upon the weights given to each by the adjudicator). Consider the following:

“You’re sitting on the train and an obviously wealthy man gets on. His wallet is sticking out of his pocket and you
steal it without him noticing. You notice the considerable amount of cash inside. Pleased with your good fortune
you suddenly undergo a moral crisis; you realise that stealing is wrong and resolve to return the wallet to the
man. However, just as you’re about to do so, you’re struck by an altruistic notion: at the other end of the carriage
is a woman trying to manage five children. A few moments ago you heard her mention that their father is dead,
and that she’s working quite a low-paying job and is having trouble making ends meet. She wishes that she had
the money to pay to send them to a college in order that they might have a better future. Whilst you’re pondering
this, the man who owns the wallet turns around and you notice that it is in fact a well-known lawyer who famously
was born into poverty and worked his way into his profession by his own labour only. Ought you give the wallet
with the cash in it to the mother, or return it to the wealthy man”

The obvious answer is that you clearly ought to return the wallet to the man. By depriving the lawyer of property
which he had justly acquired, you have a clear duty to compensate him for the harm that you have done. The
woman might be able to make better use of the money, but that’s only a side issue; it fails to establish why she’s
entitled to the money at all. Generally, potential gains in welfare (i.e. the benefit that the woman would receive)
are trumped by moral duties. This is obviously contentious when we’re considering big gains in welfare, or really
small sacrifices in rights. It might also be problematic where actors face multiple, conflicting duties. Nonetheless,
accept it as a provisional conclusion for the moment; we’ll deal with complexities later.

The second reason is related to the first. Arguments from duty, like all principled arguments, are almost always at
the centre of the “clash” in the debate. This is because, an argument that a particular actor has a duty to
undertake a particular action, regardless of the consequences, is in itself a response to every consequentialist
argument raised against it.

For instance, in the topic: That Individuals Who Have Been Trained in Social Valuable Professions In the
Developing World Should Be Forced To Work In Their Home Nation For A Period of Time, the negative would
almost certainly argue that the individuals in question would make far more money overseas than they would in
their country of origin and would be likely to return much of that money to their family in remittances which would
in turn improve that family’s prospects. They might also argue that in offering the chance to emigrate from poorer
nations, powerful incentives to pursue tertiary education are created (something that’s valuable whether or not
the individuals wind up leaving) and that networks of educated, wealthy individuals overseas are an asset to the
community which they have left (i.e. they’re the people most likely to reinvest their wealth in that nation which is
good for economic development, they may also encourage the companies for whom they may work to do the
same and make that process easier). Each of these are solid consequentialist arguments and, depending upon
how well they are made, might win a debate. The affirmative would almost certainly argue that as these
individuals have received state resources in their training, they have a duty to make good upon the investment
that the rest of the community has made in them. The community funds the training of doctors to meet the social
need in question. As such, a duty arises to honour the purpose for which community resources were allocated to
them. It would therefore be unjust to let them emigrate, independent of the consequences of their doing so. Here,
the duty argument is a response to all the consequentialist arguments raised by the opposing bench. As such it is
relevant to every aspect of the debate. This does not meant that the duty argument will always win the debate
(much will depend upon the weighting of the issues and upon the way in which the teams engage). It does,
however, mean that it is likely to be central to the outcome of the debate because it is central to the discussion.

Finally, duty arguments are important in debates simply because they often have plenty of intuitive force which
tends to mean that teams seek to clash with them. Hopefully, you’ll see why in the next section!

The Structure of a Duty Argument

Moral duties arise for a variety of reasons and as such the format in which you make your duty argument needs
to be a little flexible. It’s also important to note at the outset two types of moral duty – positive and negative.
Positive duties are duties to perform some particular action (for instance, some would argue that we have a
positive duty to aid those in extreme distress [e.g. giving to charity for famine relief]). Negative duties are duties to
(a) refrain from particular conduct and (b) compensate those harmed when we engage in the conduct in question
(e.g. a duty to refrain from causing harm to others and to compensate those whom we harm when we fail in that
duty). As a rough schematic as to the structure of a duty argument, you could do worse than the following;
1. State who owes a duty to whom and the content of that duty (i.e. the obligation that that duty actually
imposes upon the actor in question).
2. State why that duty arises. This will largely depend upon the circumstance in question. I’ll separate a few
different varieties here for the sake of clarity.
a. Negative duty to respect the rights of others. This is easy – if others have rights and choose to
exercise them, you’re under a duty not to interfere with that conduct. For instance, if we concede
individuals have a right to bodily security, you have a negative duty not to violate that right.
i. Note that there is an additional layer of complexity here, however. Some rights may require
positive actions on the part of others to be fulfilled. The extent to which others are obligated to
provide for these rights is heavily disputed (especially between egalitarians/equalitarians [e.g.
Rawls and Dworkin] and libertarans [e.g. Nozick]). For libertarians, there is no positive duty to
provide for these rights (though, see below, it may be possible to argue that a negative duty
arises). This is grounded in the basic intuition that a duty to sacrifice for the sake of others
almost always only arises where one is responsible for the state of affairs in which others find
themselves. If we’re not responsible, we’re not morally proximate to that state of affairs and owe
nothing to those whose rights are violated. For instance, everyone probably has a moral right to
a minimum standard of living sufficient to guarantee them a minimally decent life. It does not,
however, automatically follow that those who fall below that standard are automatically entitled
to receive resources from those whose standard living is higher. Others dispute this analysis and
suggest that other factors (for instance the contingency of birth and the morally arbitrary
distribution of unearned wealth and natural talents and abilities) give rise to a positive duty to
provide for certain rights. I raise this only to highlight a potential clash area where these issues
are concerned.
b. Causal responsibility. For instance, if I through my negligence cause a reasonably foreseeable injury
to another I have a moral (and in this case legal) duty to compensate him for the injury which I have
 caused. I also have a moral duty to modify my practices in the future so as to cease causing similar
harms.
c. Designated responsibility. Many liberals would argue that the state is the designated guardian of
particular ideals and institutions (e.g. a fairly common [though probably mistaken] view of the state is
that where rights and liberties are surrendered to the state, the state has a duty to use what has been
conceded to it by its population to secure benefits only possible through collective action). Similarly,
parents have a delegated responsibility to care for their children etc…
3. Conclude. Therefore, because of [insert reasons], [party/parties one] owe/owes a duty to [party/party two] to
do [content of the duty].

Consider a simple worked example. We’ll use a duty from causal responsibility for the motion THW Force
Religions To Pay Compensation To Womens’ Groups.
1. The major religions of the world have a duty to compensate womens’ groups internationally and reform their
discriminatory practices.
2. This duty arises because religions are, to a significant extent, causally responsible for the social
disadvantages many women experience. This is for a variety of reasons;
a. Religion is an extremely powerful normative force. At almost all points in the cycle of social
development, the majority of individuals look to religions for ethical and practical guidance.
b. This then means that the beliefs that religions promulgate have serious practical consequences. Many
people take what religions teach as unimpeachable, divine moral and metaphysical truth which they
are obligated to act upon. Even those who do not accept everything uncritically at least are likely to
accept that religion is an important normative influence in their lives.
c. In some instances, violence against women is not only condoned, but enforced by particular religious
institutions (think, for instance, justice in some Islamic theocracies). In this case there is an obvious
direct responsibility on the part of the institution.
d. In other instances, religions have promulgated particular beliefs which have created harmful social
conditions that legitimate acts of violence and discrimination against women (for instance, if religions
have taught that women are less than full persons, or do not deserve the same consideration as men,
even if they do not directly promote violence, they at least create the background conditions against
which harmful acts are likely to take place as the societies over which religions wield influence adopt
that view, and feel more at ease with their misogynist conduct).
e. Finally, by diminishing the social status of women by their practices and teachings, they are
responsible in part for the fact that women face continuing discrimination by institutions. They
perpetuate an incorrect and harmful view of women that makes it harder for them to access the same
opportunities as men.
f. Finally, it’s important to note that even in societies where religion now no longer preach these
messages, the beliefs that they historically promulgated have intergenerational force. Ideas do not die
with changes in the institution that once promoted them. Many people still hold to views independently
of the religious institutions that once promoted the idea.
3. Therefore, because religions are causally responsible for the discrimination faced by women, they owe a
moral duty to compensate women for the harms that they have caused, and a duty to modify their practices
to cease causing that harm.

Two Additional Considerations: Proportionality and Conflicts Between Duties

One obvious weakness in the example just presented is that the claim it makes is probably too strong: “religions
are causally responsible for the discrimination faced by women”. Whilst it does seem right that religions are
partially responsible for the social disadvantage experienced by women, it cannot be that they are entirely
responsible. For one thing, non-religious ethnic traditions are often deeply discriminatory and are just as, if not
more, repressive to women (think Subcontinental and Central Asia). Moreover, religions didn’t actually perpetuate
the harms to women in most instances. Instead, they offered people a particular view of the world that diminished
womens’ status. The society itself still had to make the decision to accept that worldview and act upon it.
This obviously raises questions of causation (i.e. to what extent did religions actually cause people to believe
their teachings and act in the ways they did), but that’s an issue for another post. Instead, the issue that’s worth
raising here is that of proportionality. Consider the following two hypotheticals.

Number One: “Country x has, once, by accident, purchased a very small amount of oil from a nasty dictator who
then used the money he got from the x to buy five-hundred AK47s, fifty of which broke. Civil war then breaks out
in the dictator’s country. The militia on the side of the dictator are armed with those same AK47s.”

Number Two: “A civil war has broken out in a state. The conflict is between a group inside that country that wants
their own state and the government. The reason that the insurgents don’t have a state is that the x and other
colonial powers carved up the country in such a way that there was always going to be fighting inside it – minority
vs majority. Let’s also say that the x has continued to purchase significant amounts of oil from this country,
knowing full well that the money it was giving to the regime was being used to buy weapons that would certainly
be used to fight against the minority. Any money left over was stolen by the regime which has created even more
public anger and lead to an increased cycle of violence. Finally, the weapons that the regime bought came from x
arms manufacturers that paid tax to x’s government.”

In which of these hypotheticals might country x have a duty to intervene in the civil war The obvious answer is the
second. The content of the duty which you owe is a function of the extent to which you are morally implicated in
the relevant state of affairs. Whilst in both cases, x is implicated in the conflict, the degree of responsibility in the
second is significantly more extensive than in the first. As such, it is more likely that a duty arises in the second
hypothetical than in the first. In each instance, x is under a duty to “compensate” the nation in which the civil war
in occurring. Their duty however, is proportionate to the extent of that responsibility.

This is important to recognise for at least two reasons. Firstly, in order to guard against making claims that are
obviously exaggerated or silly (e.g. breaking someone’s thumb does not give rise to a duty to provide a pension
for that person in perpetuity). Secondly, in order to highlight a strong line of attack against duty arguments (i.e.
that a particular duty suggested by the opposition is in fact disproportionate to their degree of responsibility).

The other interesting issue to consider here is the question of conflicting duties. It’s fairly well accepted that the
state has a duty to act in the interests of its citizens. However, that state is also under a negative duty not to harm
others. Instances where these two duties might conflict are obvious. The European Union’s Common Agricultural
Policy is (arguably) in the interests of the EU’s member states as it guarantees a market for agricultural exports
for European nations. The avoidable consequence of this policy, however, is a contraction in agricultural
production in states on the European periphery and elsewhere that, but for CAP, would be selling produce to
Europe. This is obviously deleterious for living standards in those nations. EU member states have a duty to act
in the interests of their populations. They also have a duty not to harm others. Which duty wins out

The answer to this question is obviously contentious and I can’t give an answer that will work in all
circumstances. In a principled sense, negative duties usually trump positive duties (that is, where the two conflict,
one should refrain from harming, rather than pursue a positive benefit). This ought to be enough for simple cases
(e.g. should we keep buying cheap resources from dictatorships, knowing that they’ll use that money to repress
their populations No, the negative duty not to harm others wins).

However there are plenty of instances in which it’s possible to construct a further conflict. For instance, the USA
conducts drone strikes in the FATA region of Pakistan to kill leaders of the Afghan Taliban. Those strikes
occasionally result in civilian casualties. The same conflict arises – a duty to advance the national interest (drone
strikes) vs a duty not to foreseeably harm (civilian casualties). Matters may be further complicated however.
Suppose that the USA is faced by the following dilemma. The USA has just spotted the former leader of the
Afghani Taliban government Mullah Omar in conference with the leaders of the other Taliban militia. It has an
armed drone above, ready to conduct a strike. Next door to the leaders’ meeting, five children playing in a yard
and will certainly be killed by the drone strike. The clash of duties has obviously arisen. Complicating the
situation, however, is the fact that the United States, by waging war in Afghanistan, is largely responsible for the
violent state of affairs and owes a duty to Afghanistan to pacify the nation and quell the violence its prescence
has sparked. There would be no better way to do that than to assassinate the spiritual and operational heads of
the Taliban. Thus there’s a tripartite conflict here. A positive duty to advance US national interest, a negative duty
not to harm the children, and another negative duty to compensate for the fact that Afghanistan is in a state of
civil war by pacifying the Taliban.

I don’t have a good answer as to how this dilemma might be resolved, and certainly not a prediction as to the
outcome of this discussion in a debate. Nonetheless, the following issues would certainly be relevant;
 1. What is the content of each duty morally. Is the United States in fact obligated to launch a strike against
Omar and the others
2. What are the other relevant moral concerns Is it permissible to cause some collatteral damage when in
pursuit of, hopefully, noble strategic objectives If so, then that would seem to head off the conflict in duties
because the duty not to cause harm is suspended in cases such as this.
3. Will, empirically, conducting the strike actually fulfil the duties in question. Are the some considerations, for
instance, that might point to drone strikes in fact being anathema to US interests Will assassinating the
heads of the Taliban in fact help pacify Afghanistan or will it bring firebrands to power in those movements
and further radicalise them

Group Rights vs Individual Rights

Example Topics: THW Legalise Female Genital Mutilation, THBT Countries That Criminalise Abortion Have The
Right To Stop Their Citizens Travelling Abroad to Have One, THW Abolish Religious Education, THBT
Creationism Should Be Taught Alongside Science in Schools, THW Force The Catholic Church to Employ
Female Priests, THW Ban Gay Re-Education Camps.

Intuitively, the clash in these debates is between the rights of a group to impose illiberal ways of life upon their
members and the rights of members of those groups to lead lives independently of that group. For instance, the
topic THW Permit The Teaching of Creationism in Schools, the principled material on the affirmative will concern
the extent to which the members of fundamentalist Christian groups rely upon the strength of religion in their
communities to lead flourishing and meaningful lives. The way that children are educated is obviously critical to
that. The group therefore has a right to impose their views on children. The negative will run that the right to
religious freedom is really the right to choose your religion, not the right of a group to impose religion upon you.
Thus, public education ought to be secular and rationalist, in order to enable children to make these choices
independently. Here’s a couple of typical lines that either side might want to run.

In Favour of Strong Group Rights

Communitarianism

•It’s a basic moral good that individuals lead flourishing lives where they can realise their conception of the good.

•However, the most important factor in leading a flourishing life is the community in which one lives. Communities
define the extent to which we experience meaningful relationships, the different options we can pursue in life, and
the principled background against which we develop and revise our conceptions of the good. If we’re concerned
about the welfare of individuals, therefore, we ought to be concerned with the welfare of communities. More
specifically, in order to defend the welfare of the members of that community, we ought to defend the value
systems that those communities rely upon to define themselves and access the aforementioned goods.

•As such, communities have a moral right to defend and perpetuate their value systems.

•That then means that community has a right to [insert content of motion here].

Harm Minimisation

Note: this analysis relies upon being able to establish inevitability. It can be very useful, essentially because in a
debate between two well-matched teams, communitarianism (basically the only principle open to the defence of
strong group rights) will almost always lose to a more sophisticated account of individual religious liberty. This
analysis is valuable because, when it succeeds, it puts the principled issues of the debate to one side which, with
luck will neuter the typical line run by the pro-individual rights side. We’ll use THW Legalise Female Genital
Mutilation (FGM).

•Firstly, the status quo.

oFGM is illegal.

•Firstly, that a particular type of conduct will take place regardless of legal sanction and why this is the case.

oHowever, the bans that are currently imposed upon FGM are impossible to enforce. As such, the practice
continues unabated. Sex and sexual organs are often taboo in the relevant cultures in question and as such the
issue is never discussed publicly, and it then becomes impossible for police to gather evidence about the practice
(especially when, obviously, there are no outward signs). Moreover, women are often repressed by these groups
which makes it much harder for them to publicise their stories. Finally, in many cultures FGM has a strong
religious significance (for both the men and women) which tends to dilute the deterrent power of the law. FGM is
inevitable.

•Secondly, that on that basis, the principled side of the discussion is less important than the practical. That is, that
regardless of one’s moral conception of a particular type of conduct, if it is inevitable that that conduct will occur,
the reasonable person ought to prefer the option that minimises harm. We can regret immoral conduct, but if we
can’t prevent it we’d be much better served by trying to minimise the damage that it causes.

oFGM in many cases is probably immoral and done without the consent of the women in question (especially as
they’re often quite young when it’s done). Nonetheless, if nothing can be done to prevent it, we’d do better to try
and minimise the harm than legislate ineffectually.

•Thirdly, harms are occurring as a result of the absolute prohibition of the conduct in question. That is, that the
illegality of the conduct is causing harm. If we legalised the conduct, we could improve the situation.

oThe practice is unregulated. FGM is thus performed by people without any medical training. It is also often quite
brutal. Both these things could be alleviated if we legalised the practice and regulated it – doctors could perform
the treatments as safely as possible (even if it’s impossible to be completely safe, it’s at least better than the
status quo).

oOther typical harms you might run here include unenforceability (and thus a victimisation of minority groups),
alienating antisocial communities even further from the state which makes them even harder to police, breaking
up unhelpful social taboos etc…

•Fourthly, therefore we should permit [insert topic here].

In Favour Of Strong Individual Rights

Freedom to Pursue One’s Own Conception of the Good

The typical application of this argument is to religious and ethnic groups that claim the right to coercively impose
their views upon another group (e.g. the state imposing a particular faith upon its whole population, a church
monopolising the religious views of its students etc…).

•The most fundamental right of all the right to rationally develop and revise a conception of the good life and
pursue it in the world.

•Such a life will only ever be good for an individual when that individual has independently chosen that life, free
from coercion.

oI.e. where a conception of the good is imposed on someone, they’ve been denied the opportunity to opt for a life
that would be better for them as individuals; they never had the chance to choose. Moreover, people need to
independently endorse their own choices in life before they’re valuable. If the state was to force us all to attend
the opera on the grounds that it would be good for us, most people would get no good out of it at all. Not because
opera’s not valuable in itself, but because a person is unlikely to derive value from an activity they’ve been
coerced into doing – they’ll resist.

•As such, it is wrong for any group to coercively impose its way of life upon anyone, especially where those
individuals did not have a meaningful chance to consent to that way of life (e.g. children, the mentally disabled
etc…).

•Therefore we ought not permit x to coercively impose y on z.

Speech Act Theory

This is a good response to the harm minimisation analysis above. Even if we can’t prevent the harms of a
particular practice, there might (1) still be a worse harm in legalising it and/or (2) there might be a value in an
unenforceable law. The argument works by establishing that particular acts of expression (statements or states of
affairs) are in fact acts in themselves and as such have morally significant consequences.

The argument works like this;

•Outline the speech act;

oPornography is legal.

•Outline the actor and why that actor is powerful in the relevant sense.

oThe government (and because we’re a democracy the majority) keep pornography legal, and widely consume it.
People therefore reasonably take the will of the government to be the will of the majority.

•State the consequences of the speech act.

oThe fact that pornography is still legal has a number of consequences;

It legitimises the value system that pornographers communicate through their content. In that value system,
women are subordinate ‘fuck objects’ and always depicted as inferior to men. That value system is lent a
majoritarian legitimacy by the fact that pornography is still legal. As such, it makes more people likely to act on
that value system. In this way, further discrimination against women is legitimised. That’s an obvious harm to
women.

It ranks women as inferior which makes it harder for them to be treated as equally important members of the
community, harder for them to therefore be treated as moral equals, and arbitrarily more difficult for them to
progress their agenda socially and politically.
1. •Conclude: therefore x speech act harms y group.

Just War Theory

There are three parts to just war theory. Jus ad Bellum deals with the conditions that must be met before an actor
may permissibly go to war. Jus in Bello refers to the principles that soldiers and states ought to observe as they
fight their wars. Jus post bellum refers to the obligations the belligerents owe to each other once hostilities have
ceased. This guide refers only to the jus ad bellum, as it’s of the greatest general application for debates.

Just War Theory

Though there are disputes between theorists, there are five generally accepted conditions that must be satisfied
for a war to be considered morally permissible. Most theorists agree that all principles must be satisfied, not
merely some. However, it is not necessary to refer to all of these principles in every debate (i.e. there are some
that are intuitively less relevant than others, depending on the debate). A working knowledge of them, however, is
a terrific way to generate material and offers a concrete schematic around which a case can be structured. Lastly,
a word of caution: if you use these principles, don’t explicitly refer to them as “Just War Theory”. These principles
are relevant because they each have an independent moral significance, not because they’re just a part of a
particular philosophical discussion. As such, move through them as distinct arguments.

First Principle: The war must be declared and waged by a legitimate authority.

This sounds reasonable, but what is a legitimate authority It’s generally accepted that states with normatively
legitimate governments have the right to wage war. Limiting it to states is desirable on a number of grounds. If the
group waging the war is not itself legitimate they cannot reasonably be said to be acting on behalf of the people
of the state they’re supposed to represent internationally. Moreover, we generally disapprove of illegitimate actors
engaging in war because they cannot be held to account, either in the international arena or by their populations.
Most legitimate governments are ultimately subject to democratic safeguards, and can be pressured
internationally through international institutions (e.g. the UN) or by other means (e.g. trade sanctions). It is
therefore much easier to hold governments to account than it is to hold private actors. This matters because wars
frequently move in unexpected directions and it’s critical that we can put a brake on the belligerents when they
do. You might also want to say here that war is primarily a matter of defending state sovereignty and territorial
integrity. Someone has to make a judgement about whether those interests have actually been abridged and then
go to war on behalf of them. We also want to minimise war as much as possible. As such, the state is the actor
both best placed to judge whether its own sovereignty has been violated or if its territorial integrity is under threat
and, for strategic reasons, is best placed to engage in that conflict.
The 20th Century, however, saw this category expanded to national liberation movements fighting against an
illegitimate government (e.g. the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in the 1990s and the early 2000s, or Fretlin and
the various other East Timorese liberation groups). Intuitively, it also seems as though a group subject to
government violence also probably has the right to wage war to defend itself.

Private actors without a just cause (e.g. Al Qaeda) are obviously not legitimate authorities on this score and so
lack the moral right to wage war.

Second Principle: Just Cause

This is the most intuitively obvious of all these requirements. The only morally acceptable wars are those for
which there is a just cause. There are two generally accepted species of just cause – self defence, and
humanitarian intervention.

On the matter of self-defence, individuals have the right to defend themselves from violence. States, by analogy,
must also therefore have the right to defend themselves with violence. It’s important to be careful in applying this
reasoning, however. We might want to say that Western Europe was largely justified in defending itself in the first
and second world wars. That seems true, but to apply that standard uncritically is to neglect, for instance, the
culpability of various Western European nations in creating the background conditions against which the Second
World War occurred (the treaty of Versailles, for instance).

Humanitarian intervention. Just as we recognise the moral good of aiding others (especially when those
individuals cannot defend themselves), we recognise the moral good of aiding other collectives when they are
under attack. This extends only to helping to repel the attack. Anything further is illegitimate. The paradigm
instances of this are obviously where basic rights are being greatly infringed in a systematic, and intentional way.
For instance, in the 1970s Vietnam invaded Cambodia to oust Pol Pott and end the horror of the killing fields.
Some more contentious instances are outlined below.

It’s important to note that just cause does not mean that a duty to go to war arises. Only, that we have satisfied
one of the conditions necessary for going to war. Wars should be waged only if the reasonably foreseeable
harms of going to war will be less than the reasonably foreseeable evil we’re trying to prevent. There might be a
good humanitarian intervention case to be made for invading Syria at the moment (12/05/2012). However, given
that the potential consequences of invading them might be worse than the current strife (e.g. the risk of being
tangled in a protracted civil war, the ris of escalation, the likely response from Iran and their proxies in Gaza, Iraq
and Lebanon, together with the likely increase in Israeli aggression that would accompany these developments).
A just cause for intervention probably arises, but pragmatic concerns mean that we ought not go to war.

Though the question of what constitutes just cause is obviously contentious, types of wars generally considered
unjust are: wars of aggression (or perhaps acts of aggression, which can be interpreted narrowly [war] or
capaciously [sanctions that impoverish many people]), preventative war (e.g. Iraq 2003), wars justifiable only on
national interest grounds (i.e. our right to pursue our interests internationally is curtailed by the harm we might do
to others; an obvious concern in the context of war)

Coady also observes (see references below) that the non-military measures we employ pre-emptively can have
drastically harmful consequences. For instance, the Treaty of Versailles Post WWI was an attempt to make
Germany (1) pay back Europe for the damage of the war and (2) cripple them so that they couldn’t fight another
war. The Second World War occurred largely because Hitler was able to come to power on a platform that
involved the rejection of all guilt from WWI; still prescient because of the ongoing hardships from the treaty.

It’s also important to situate this requirement in the context of the broader discourse about cosmopolitanism.
Cosmopolitans argue that the individual, not the state or community, is the fundamental unit of moral concern.
Individuals ought to be in at least some sense regarded as moral equals. It seems unjust that some suffer as a
result of being born into states that abuse their rights and deny them their basic entitlements. As such, many
cosmopolitans see humanitarian intervention as implying a new view of sovereignty. Governments’ rights to
represent their populations are conditional upon them respecting (or possibly advancing) the interests of their
populations. Where they fail to do so, those governments are exceeding their right to rule those nations, and it
might be just to intervene, subject to a number of other requirements (amongst which would be the other factors
outlined in this article). The modern doctrine of responsibility to protect can be seen as an attempt to
institutionalise and a more cosmopolitan view of sovereignty as a responsibility, rather than a right. This new
conception of when conflict might be permissible, might justify some of the other grounds upon which we’ve
conducted interventions. For instance, in the early 1990s the USA intervened in Somalia to alleviate acute
material distress (famine). In 2011, France and the UN intervened in support of the democracy in Cote Ivoire. It
might also be permissible to aid an insurgency committed to toppling an illegitimate and abusive regime (perhaps
a justification [though not the only justification] for the 2001 action in Afghanistan in support of the Northern
Alliance against the Taliban).

This new cosmopolitan view, however, certainly does not imply that any rights abuses give rise to a right to go to
war. Other questions such as proportionality also play a key role.

Third Principle: War must be the last reasonable resort

War is hell, it’s often said. It’s very difficult to predict the outcome of a a war, though it is certain that harm will
occur. The phenomenon of mission creep means that a war that begins as just and is initially fought morally may
end up consisting of a series of unjust objectives pursued in an immoral fashion. We ought, therefore, only go to
war if we have no other choice.

Of course, nothing is ever the “last resort” in totality (i.e. there’s always probably something else we could try).
However, if all other solutions are not reasonably likely to be successful, or if the costs of trying those solutions
were reasonably sure to be higher than the costs of invasion, then war is justifiable. It’s also important to
recognise this this notion has been built into modern notions of Responsibility to Protect (see below).

Fourth Principle: There must be a reasonable prospect of success

Wars that one side cannot hope to win cause needless suffering and therefore ought not be engaged in.
Success, however, is a slippery term. Might success in Afghanistan mean advancement in the rights of some
sectors of the population, deterring terrorists, defeating the Taliban, or installing a western-style democracy I raise
the issue only to highlight that when you’re using these arguments in debates, it’s important to be clear about the
object you’re pursuing through intervention.

Fifth Principle: The violence used must be proportional to the wrong being resisted.

This is common sense – it is obviously unjust to invade a country and permanently occupy it in response to a
low-level provocation. In the case of defensive wars, it’s clear that proportionality might mean force sufficient to
repel the attack in question. It might, more contentiously, also cover a limited amount of force sufficient to deter
future attacks.

In the case of humanitarian intervention, however, this calculus will be more complex as the interventions in
question are, often, not simply about repelling an attack. They might also be about advancing other causes (e.g.
for instance, we might intervene to alleviate material distress in a particular nation which, if we’re serious, might
require us to not only deliver food aid but also perhaps engage in open hostilities with a variety of actors). I’m
unsure exactly what I think the right way to make this calculus is. Intuitively, however, I feel as though given the
other requirements that the doctrine of just war requires (especially that of a reasonable prospect of success and
last resort), suggest that provided the objectives that the intervention seeks are just, proportionality would
probably require that states use the minimal amount of force sufficient to meet those objectives. This again
highlights the importance of clear objectives in these discussions. If the objective of a humanitarian intervention is
to feed, then perhaps a small force might be sufficient, if its object is simply to deliver food. If the objective is to
both feed and prevent future famines, presumably that will require a more extensive intervention which might
justify a larger military force.

Discussion

Underwriting this discussion are a couple of issues.

Firstly, there are severe epistemological problems with some of these requirements. For instance, it’s almost
impossible to know if something is or is not the last reasonable resort (though we may be able to make a
reasonable judgement on that score), or whether or not there is a reasonable prospect of success (the opposing
force might down guns at the first sign of intervention, or dig in and fight ever harder.

Secondly, there is a broad, overarching requirement that where we go to war, we can only do so if the reasonably
foreseeable benefits of the intervention are greater than that of the reasonably foreseeable harms. For instance,
though the USSR’s intervention in Czechoslovakia might have given the rest of the world grounds to intervene, it
would have been suicidally risky to do so, given the prospect of nuclear conflict it would have raised. There is
also an interesting interplay here with the epistemological difficulties mentioned before. Broadly speaking, if it’s
effectively impossible to assess the likely consequences of going to war (as it is in many if not most cases), it’s
very hard to decide whether or not we ought to act upon our right to engage in war arising from these principles.
These are obviously very vexed questions. This might also explain the more conservative overtones of the
doctrine – the requirements as to whether or not a right to go to war arises are demanding precisely because the
aim of the doctrine is to minimise conflict overall.

It is also worth observing that many neoconservatives and utilitarians don’t tend to engage much with this
doctrine because it constrains the capacity of states to use massive force to deter future attacks where doing so
would deter war long-term (and hopefully thereby maximise utility). Israeli foreign policy is perhaps the best
example of disproportionate force (e.g. their 2006 invasion of Lebanon, and their 2009 invasion of Gaza).

I’d finally like to briefly try and relate just war theory to the modern doctrine of responsibility to protect (R2P).

Responsibility to protect is a new idea about state sovereignty. Though philosophers have interrogated the notion
of sovereignty for hundreds of years, prior to WWII the international community had conceived of sovereignty as
the right of a state to rule their own populations. Following the horrors of the second world war, a more
cosmopolitan idea took hold. To radically oversimplify, many cosmopolitans have now come to argue that the
right of the state is conditioned by a responsibility to protect the fundamental interests of their citizens. Where
states fail to do so, they are failing in their duty to their citizens. This has been taken by some, in turn, as giving
rise to a right to intervene in those nations. This pattern of thought underlies the modern doctrine of
Responsibility to Protect, passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005. The effectiveness and
justifiability of the doctrine is discussed elsewhere by those significantly more qualified than myself, so I shan’t
attempt the task myself. I can (copy and pasting from the Wikipedia page on responsibility to protect) however
provide the three tenets of the doctrine.
1. “A state has a responsibility to protect its population from mass atrocities,
2. The international community has a responsibility to assist the state if it is unable to protect its population on
its own.
3. If the state fails to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures have failed, the
international community has the responsibility to intervene through coercive measures such as economic
sanctions. Military intervention is considered the last resort.”

I’ll relate Just War Theory to this in two ways. One of the ideas underpinning R2P seems to be that we have not
only a right, but also a duty to intervene in particular conflicts. This, to me, raises two questions. Firstly, why does
that duty arise Several answers are possible, and I’m certainly far from decided on this issue. However, for the
purposes of demonstration, I’ll adapt a cosmopolitan argument from Thomas Pogge to argue that a duty to
intervene might possibly arise. To be clear, in no work that I’m aware of does Pogge ever defend the idea that his
argument gives support for military intervention.

“A moral duty arise between the West and some developing nations to intercede in cases of human rights
abuses. The rules governing the relationships between states have been (1) imposed by powerful western
nations and (2) foreseeably create harms to people in developing nations. They do so by, firstly, granting
international legitimacy to any group that maintains a preponderance of force in a territorial area, regardless of
the normative quality of the group in question. Those groups are then permitted to borrow money on behalf of
populations they do not legitimately represent, and to extract and sell those states’ natural resources. This
foreseeably entrenches the position of those regimes. The West is responsible for that structure and so owes a
moral duty to remedy the harms that it has caused to people in developing nations. In some cases, the only
possible way to make recompense is to remove the regimes in question, and so we have a duty to do so in those
cases.”

Secondly, it’s important to recognise that the requirements of R2P, narrowly construed, probably justify
intervention in many conflicts internationally. However, this could hardly be the end of the story. This is because
even if a state was abusing its population and the international community had exhausted all other avenues, it
does not automatically follow that intervention is prudent. Military intervention might inflame that conflict, or draw
other players into the conflict, escalate regional tensions etc… The application of R2P, then, must necessarily
take place in a broader discourse that considers the likely outcome of the war, all things considered. This, recall,
is a overarching principle of just war doctrine. Similarly, questions of proportionality, the likelihood of success, the
legitimacy of the actors likely to undertake the intervention etc… will all also be relevant. As such, in R2P cases,
it’s critical to also consider the issues raised by just war theory.

Children: The Right to an Open Future

Most children will eventually develop a level of physical and rational capacity such that they will be able to make
largely independent, informed choices in line with their own conception of the good. The obvious point, though, is
that they aren’t there yet. There seems at least a strong intuitive case for limiting their rights until they have the
capacity to make choices for themselves about their own life. What principles ought to guide that paternalism,
however Is it permissible for parents to indoctrinate a child into an extremist religion, for instance Or, to phrase
the issue the other way around, is it repressive for children to be raised in a society dominated by particular
gender norms
One answer that some liberals have argued for (starting with Joel Feinberg) is that a child deserves a right to an
open future.
•Societies give individuals rights in order to maximise their prospects of leading a good life.
oThe best societies are those comprised of flourishing individuals who are allowed to develop their own good in
their own way.
oWe therefore grant rights to individuals in order that they can grow to become rational, free and autonomous;
three essential preconditions of individual development (check out the liberty argument for further explanation of
this premise).
For instance, a right to free speech is essential to allow adults to grow to become rational and autonomous
individuals.
oThis then maximises individual flourishing and, in turn, healthy societies.
oLiberty (understood as rationality, autonomy and freedom) is thus the precondition of social utility and the
ground of all rights.
•This analysis works very well for the liberties we permit to adults with full cognitive capacity.
•Premise: Children do not have full rights-bearing capacity because of certain intellectual and physical constraints
– products of their age and relative inexperience.
oA question therefore arises: what does a liberal society owe to those who do not yet, but inevitably will, have the
capacity to become rational, free and autonomous.
•The obvious liberal answer is that we owe children a right to an open future.
oThat is, a future that preserves for them a maximal number of options and liberties.
oThe exercise of those liberties will then facilitate their fullest development in accordance with the principles that
I’ve just outlined.
•Respecting a right to an open future in turn requires a respect for two further types of rights.
oDependency rights – those that are derived from a dependence upon others for the basic needs of existence –
food, shelter, protection etc…
Dependency rights are important because a child’s capacity for autonomy (i.e. their capacity to independently
distinguish between various options) requires that child is raised with the physical capacity for intellectual
development. A child born into pain and misery and without its basic needs catered for will not grow to full
capacity and will not achieve his basic goods.
oRights-in-trust – rights that a child is not yet capable of exercising but which it will have a right to in the future
(e.g. voting). Acting in respect of this right is to guarantee that, when a child is old enough, it will be able to
exercise those rights (e.g. voting).
These are distinctive in that they impose duties upon others in advance of the subject being able to exercise
those rights – “a right to have a right”.
For instance, a rights-in-trust holder is deprived of the ability to exercise her right to free religious observation and
practice if she is prevented from freely forming the necessary knowledge base, which allows them to select their
faith or lack thereof.
These are also central – the rights and liberties currently enjoyed by those who have reached the age of the
majority are crucial for individual flourishing. We want society to flourish into the future. Therefore we need to
keep those options open for children in order to preserve a utility-maximising society.
•The Right to an Open Future has a Number of Implications. These two are drawn from Mianna Lotz’s excellent
article, referenced below (though some of the conclusions are adapted and changed from her analysis).
•Approximate parent-neutrality.
oBy imposing one particular set of values upon children, adults impede their capacity to develop in the future.
Rationally, parents inculcate certain moral assumptions into the psyche of their children. For instance, a very
religious family that only allows their children to consume material that advocates right-to-life, limits that child’s
future in two ways.
•It prejudices them against exercising the option to have an abortion.
•It does not allow that child the capacity to make a rational choice about the issue when they are older because
their unshakable moral assumptions will be steeped in the particular ideology. The rationality of that child is
therefore permanently damaged.
oTherefore, parents ought to be as approximately neutral as possible – exposing their child to as many
experiences and points of view as possible without didactically instructing their children to believe in any one
particular faith. That child must always understand that the option to disagree remains open to them, otherwise it
is violation of their right to an open future.
The implications of this are extremely wide-ranging – religious schools, gay re-education camps, raising children
to be any religion in particular etc…
•Approximate state-neutrality.
oThe state is a powerful inculcator of values in itself, but also in the different views and practices that it tolerates.
oTherefore, the extent to which children will develop to be rational, autonomous and free agents is limited entirely
by what the state permits them to consume.
oThe state must permit a maximum possible level of discourse and discussion about pragmatic and metaphysical
ideas in order that children might be able to make an informed and rational choice. To do anything less is a
violation of that child’s right to an open future.

Democracy
Most theories of democracy can be read as an attempt to legitimise the fact of government power. The basic
thrust of it goes like this: generally, we seem to want to presume in favour of giving people their liberty. Any
restriction upon their liberty therefore needs justification (e.g. to deprive someone of their liberty by putting them
in prison, we need to prove before an impartial court that that person was guilty of an offence beyond reasonable
doubt). All government actions are in some way coercive. How, then, can we justify that coercion

This is a question at the heart of theorising about democracy, but it’s also the discussion that animates the issue
at the heart of most debates about democracy. Is it legitimate for a democracy to do x Theories of democracy
tend to be intensely complex, and a full account of them would be well beyond the scope of this humble blog.
What I’ll do instead then is outline my preferred view of democracy (Ronald Dworkin’s Partnership Conception of
Democracy, see Sovereign Virtue, pages 356-70) and try to show how it applies to some other debates. This
post deals with some other conceptions of the role of the state which are likely to be relevant in any democracy
debate.

Before we go on to that, though, it probably makes sense to clarify a couple of basic facts about the way that
democracies operate in order to put the theoretical discussion into context. Here’s a quick rundown on a couple
of basic, important institutions of government.
1. •Separation of powers. In most democracies, government is separated into three arms. The normative
reasons for this separation are explored below.
a. The legislature (the body that creates the laws; parliament).
b. The executive (the body that enacts the laws created by the legislature; the cabinet, government
departments and administrative officials [e.g. Centrelink, the Departments of Health, Transport etc...],
police, where relevant, the president etc…).
c. The judiciary (the body that interprets the laws enacted by the legislature).
2. •Law. There are a number of different types of law.
a. Common Law – judge-made law. For instance, the tort of Wilkinson v Downton (under which one can
sue for intentionally caused acts of specific psychological harm) is a law that originated entirely within
the court-room, as did much of the law of negligence, contracts etc… Where judges make decisions,
they are contributing to a body of precedent which, following their decision, becomes enforceable law.
The limits of their capacity to do so are of course contested and controversial. Not all precedents are
binding upon every court. A lower court is bound to follow precedents set by superior courts. Where a
court is considering a precedent from a lower or equal court, it is permitted to overrule that precedent
(in Australia). Superior courts can consider precedent from other jurisdictions, but those precedents
are not considered to be binding upon the court, they are merely persuasive. Finally, not all
democracies have common law. Those that do, however, are known as common law systems (as
opposed to civil law systems such as France).
b. Equity – equity was created in the early days of the British legal system to address potential injustices
created by the harsh, black-and-white nature of the common law system. Equity is a deeply complex
body of law of which yours truly has only the most rudimentary grasp. The salient point is that where
there is a conflict between the common law and equity, equity trumps the common law.
c. Statute – laws made by legislatures. Courts interpret these laws. In common-law jurisdictions, these
laws tend to be (though certainly not in every circumstance) phrased in more general terms, and
courts are left to apply the law to more specific instances. Where there is a conflict between statute
and the common law, or statute and equity, the statute trumps both. This, in part, is an
acknowledgement of the supremacy of parliament. The thought goes that in most democracies,
judges are not elected and as such should not be permitted to impose their will. Only a body with a
mandate from the population ought to be permitted to do so, and the only such body is parliament. It’s
important to note, though, that judges have significant degree of discretion in the manner in which
they choose to interpret those statutes. In Plaintiff S157, the High Court of Australia stated that in
interpreting statutes, courts should prefer constructions that honour the common-law rights of the
individual unless there is very clear language in the statute to the contrary.
d. Constitutional law – laws emanating from the agreement at the foundation of the system of
government in question. In most democracies, this takes the form of a written document interpreted by
the courts to make up the body of constitutional law. In some nations (notably Britain), however, there
is no written constitution and courts themselves determine which laws are to be taken as
constitutional. In any case, constitutions prescribe the limits of government power (e.g. the first
amendment of the United States’ Constitution specifies, among other things, that “congress shall
make no law… abridging freedom of speech…”). Some constitutions also impose positive duties upon
governments (e.g. the constitution of California [due to the great number of Citizen Initiated
Referenda] imposes significant positive duties upon the government of that state). Where a conflict
arises between constitutional law and any other form of law, jurisdictions with judicial review (see
immediately below) require courts to find that legislation unconstitutional and strike it down.
3. •Judicial Review. In almost all democracies, governments can only pass laws within the limits defined by a
constitution. Where governments exceed those limits by creating laws inconsistent with the constitution,
courts may find those laws unconstitutional and they can be voided. Courts do not always void entire pieces
of legislation; they can find only particular sections of them unconstitutional and uphold the rest, or strike
the entire law. In most democracies, only very senior courts can rule on constitutional matters.
4. •Representation. Nearly all democratic systems involve some sort of representation. A group of people
elect a representative to act on their behalf in the relevant decision-making bodies. In nearly every
democracy, any person can stand for election as a representative. Most representatives are drawn from
political parties who, in turn, choose their representatives according to their own procedures (e.g. the
Democrats and Republicans in the USA choose their candidates via the primary system, whereby a number
of individuals compete with one another to secure their party’s nomination as their candidate for president.
They do this by competing in a number of ‘primary’ state ballots until one person has a sufficient number of
votes to declare majority support within the party. That support is then confirmed at the party’s convention.).
The way those candidates are chosen is also important. Proportional representation systems designate a
fixed number of seats available within a given electorate. Those seats are then allocated based upon the
proportion of votes received (e.g. if 30% of the vote went to party A, an 70% to party B, 30% of the seats
should go to A, 70% to B). This is the system Australia uses to elect its senate representatives.
First-past-the-post systems are used where there is only one position in play. The candidate that secures
 the greatest number of votes in that electorate is the winner. Proportional voting systems allow individuals
to vote for candidates in their preferred order. If no candidate secures an absolute majority of first
preference votes in the electorate, the candidate with the lowest number of votes will be eliminated, and
those who placed that candidate as their first preference will have their vote reallocated to their second
preference. The process is repeated until a majority candidate emerge. In Australia, we use proportional
representation for the upper house, and preferential representation for the lower house. The voting system
used affects whose interests get represented in parliament. For instance, it was only in the most recent
federal elections that the Greens won a seat in the lower house, yet they’ve been consistently elected to the
upper house for many years. This is because though there may be a sufficient number of voters to elect
Greens candidates statewide, those voters are unlikely to be sufficiently concentrated in a single electorate
to elect someone to the lower house.
5. •Discretion. Discretion exists at many different levels of government. Ministers often have the discretion to
make particular decisions under the law (e.g. many immigration matters are left to the discretion of the
minister under the relevant legislation). Judges use their discretion in deciding upon sentences for criminals
within the statutory guidelines. Much discretion, however, is simply an unavoidable fact. For instance, a
police officer who catches someone speeding slightly over the limit may choose not to fine the person that
they have caught, perhaps because they feel as though it has been sufficient to warn that person not to
speed; fining them may not have been necessary to make them slow down. Discretion can obviously be
both a good and bad thing. It’s probably desirable that police officers are able to enforce speeding laws
somewhat selectively – if it’s not necessary to punish someone to make them change their behaviour, and if
their behaviour wasn’t that harmful to begin with, discretion seems like the best option in that instance. It’s
also valuable when dealing with communities who may not have good relations with the law – heavy
enforcement might provoke resentment towards the police and make it harder to ensure compliance. On
the other hand, discretion can also permit police to act upon their prejudices and end in the victimisation of
particular communities. You’re disproportionately more likely, for instance, to be searched and arrested for
possession of marijuana in California if you’re black than if you’re white. Discretion is an inevitable fact of
relying upon human beings to enforce the law. The challenge, perhaps, is to ensure that where that
discretion exists, it is deployed appropriately. In some cases, this will not be possible, which ought, perhaps,
prompt us to consider whether the harm done through the inappropriate use of discretion outweighs the
benefit of a law that can will not be enforced fairly.

The Partnership Conception of Democracy

Ronald Dworkin distinguishes the partnership conception of democracy from the majoritarian conception of
democracy. The majoritarian conception of democracy views democracy as rule by the majority of people. More
sophisticated accounts of majoritarianism democracy argue that a condition of that form of government’s
legitimacy is that that government permits its citizens to deliberate over policy options, then choose which way to
vote. Dworkin rejects this view for a variety of reasons, chief among which is that there doesn’t seem to be
anything intrinsically valuable about a system of governance that permits the majority to impose their will upon
the minority. The partnership conception of democracy, by contrast, sees democracy as rule by all the people (not
merely the majority). Each person ought to be able to view themselves as a ‘joint author’ of democratic decisions.
Dworkin argues that the partnership conception of democracy has three components. Firstly, popular sovereignty
(effectively that the people must be ultimately the ones in charge, not officials). This is fairly uncontroversial in
debaterland. The latter two requirements (equality and democratic discourse) are likely to be relevant in most
democracy debates, and are as follows.

Equality

Individuals are moral equals, and should be treated as such. That’s uncontroversial. Exactly what moral equality
implies, however, is deeply contentious. Does it imply equal rights, or institutions that are gender/race-blind, or
guaranteeing equal financial status, or perhaps an equal threshold in capability to achieve certain functionings
There are tangible connections between these conceptions of equality, and debates about democracy, but
broadly speaking, they’re happily incidental to bigger ideas.

The most salient fact about democracy and equality is that it’s a system that, whilst it does a better job of treating
people as moral equals than, say, totalitarianism, it’s also a system of government that’s capable of treating
people very unequally. A principal reason for this is that in a democracy, power rests with the majority. The
majority are likely to seek to advance their own interests, and may not have an incentive to consider the interests
of minorities. This is what John Stuart Mill famously called the ‘tyranny of the majority’. The result is often laws
that fail to treat people as equals. Take, for instance, the laws recently passed in Arizona, that give police the
power to demand identification documents from anyone they suspect to be an illegal immigrant. The effect of this,
of course, is to force anyone of Hispanic appearance to permanently carrying something to prove their citizenry.
Or, take laws prohibiting the possession and consumption of drugs, which are enforced far more harshly upon
blacks than on whites. Or maybe take guest worker programmes, which admit certain foreign nationals to work,
but make the denial of their citizenship a condition of their admittance into the country.

Democracies ought to treat people as moral equals, but also often fail to do so.

Dworkin is, as ever, excellent on this question. Laws are enforced upon people who both do, and do not
personally agree with those laws. One of the legitimating conditions of that particular form of coercion, then, is
that where those laws are enforced, they apply equally to everyone. Individuals should have equal political power
to guarantee an equal capacity to influence democratic institutions. It is of equal importance that all lives flourish,
and laws in a democratic society should not arbitrarily hamper the capacity of any one group to do so. Finally,
individuals must be treated with a procedural equality also – laws should not be enforced more harshly upon
people of different races or genders, courts should be impartial, and so forth.

Consider carefully some implications of this view.

First, equal application of laws. It seems obviously unjust that a law banning access to some public institution
should apply only to people of a particular race, for instance. No person had the capacity to choose their race and
as such no person deserves to suffer on that basis. Similarly, a law that is written so that it applies to everyone,
but is enforced disproportionately upon members of a particular group, might also give us pause to consider its
legitimacy.

Second, individuals should have equal political power. What’s wrong with permitting billionaires to donate large
sums of money to political parties It’s their money after all; why can’t they spend it as they like The answer is that
there’s a very small group of billionaires with a very discreet set of interests that they have a unique capacity to
advance. Their donations to political parties are vital for those parties’ political viability. Wealthy donors can,
effectively, make those donations conditional upon some outcome favourable to themselves. The ordinary person
who cannot afford to do so entirely lacks this capacity, and so has a level of political power very unequal to that of
a very wealthy person. Similar things might be said about permitting individuals to sell their vote, allowing
politicians to gerrymander electorates, banning prisoners from voting etc…

Third, individuals should have an equal capacity to flourish. If 99% of the community want to ban BDSM, why
should they not be permitted to do so Well, if we accept that individuals have an equal right to flourish, and we
accept that sexuality and sexual satisfaction is an important component of that flourishing, and we know that
BDSM is a sexual practice that harms no-one except the individuals involved, and if banning BDSM would
impede the capacity of a group of individuals to lead a flourishing life, no matter the weight of majority opinion, a
right to ban that conduct does not arise. That seems like a fairly plausible chain of reasoning, but what if we’re
talking about something like the right to sell yourself into slavery. Presumably the same sort of logic could be
applied to that case, but a law that permitted someone to sell themselves into slavery would be very likely to lead,
ultimately, to a greater restriction upon their capacity to flourish than the banning of slavery. This is because a
person may have passing preference to become a slave, but in the long-term is likely to realise that this is not in
their interests. The nature of slavery is such that one vitiates one’s entire set of rights and liberties and hands
total control of their life to another. They’re likely to change their mind about slavery, but can never act on their
new impulse. Over the long term, then we’re more likely to promote that person’s flourishing by refusing to permit
them to sell themselves into slavery than we are by permitting them to do so. In this way, the requirement of
equality is a powerful protector of liberty.

Finally, procedural equality. What would be wrong with permitting juries to return a verdict of not guilty if they think
that the law under which a person is to be convicted is unjust One issue at least is that juries are not likely to be
uniform in their view of what is just and unjust. Some very similar cases are likely to have guilty verdicts returned,
others will have not guilty verdicts returned. In that way, there’s a lack of procedural equality between individuals.
Democratic Discourse

Another of Dworkin’s legitimating conditions is that of democratic discourse. Democracy is a system of collective
action – the ideal conception of democracy is not that of rule by the majority of people, but rather of rule by all of
the people. Every citizen ought to be able to regard themselves in some way as a ‘joint author’ of democratic
decisions. For genuine collective action to take place, citizens must deliberate together, argue the reasons for
and against each proposal. Each citizen must feel as though they have had the capacity to persuade others and,
as such, contributed meaningfully to the process of ‘writing the law’. This means both that every person must
have an equal opportunity to contribute to democratic discourse, and that that discourse must be such that it
genuinely facilitates a discourse on the issues. If either condition is not met, citizens can hardly regard
themselves as a partner in democracy.

Democratic discourse is connected for obvious reasons to the regulation of free speech. Each of the elements of
Dworkin’s conception of democracy are affected by free speech. The extent to which the people are in fact the
sovereign masters of their own country is linked in an obvious way to the extent to which people are free to
criticise that government’s actions, and know what that government is doing in their name. Similarly, free speech
impacts upon equality – where we restrict free speech the restrictions must inevitably affect some more than
others, which places them at a disadvantage in the marketplace of ideas, and denies them equality. There are
also impacts upon democratic discourse. There must be a sufficient degree of free speech to permit discourse to
occur in the first place. However, much which is said under ‘free speech’ protections degrades the quality of
political discourse (think attack ads which shift the focus of political campaigns away from issues).

Speech Act Theory

Debaters often (generally more out of necessity than choice) argue that a particular policy will “send a strong
message”. The problem is establishing a link between that message and any real change with which the debate
might be concerned. Illocutionary act theory (or speech act theory) is a philosophical idea that can be really
helpful here! Note, the Langton article referred to throughout is: Rae Langton, ‘Pornography, Speech Acts and
Silence’ in Hugh LaFollette (ed) Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (Blackwell, 3rd edition, 2007) 338.

Illocutionary Act Theory

This analysis is a way of making the typical argument that something “sends a strong message” both more
analytic and linked more closely to reality. It seeks to analyse the consequences of that which is implicit either
within states of affairs or acts of expression understood more conventionally (i.e. specific actions or statements).
Note that I’ve used the phrases “speech” and “expression” interchangeably and in their broadest senses – as
literally anything that expresses something (e.g. both audibly cursing at someone and punching them in the face
express contempt).
1. •The premise of the argument is that in any act of expression, there are at least two processes enacted;
a. The direct effect (or the “perlocutionary”). Langton suggests that we conceive of this as the
consequences of a particular act of speech.
b. The tacit effect (or the “illocutionary”). Langton suggests that we ought to conceive of this as the
speech itself as in act. That is that quite apart from the consequences of the speech, the speech itself
performs certain functions.
2. •The direct effect needs little explanation. If a person with the requisite authority gives an instruction, the
direct effect of that will be the carrying out of the instruction. E.g. if a superior officer instructs a junior officer
to carry out an order, the direct effect will be the execution of the order.
3. •The tacit effect is more interesting. For instance, let’s say that a very large, strong and imposing man
forcefully gives an order to a small girl. These two individuals have never met before. The direct effect of his
words is likely to be that the girl will carry out his instructions. The words themselves, however, establish a
power relationship between the two individuals in which the man is superior and the woman is subordinate.
In addition it is likely that the girl now feels intimidated and feels less free than she otherwise might because
she’s been intimidated by the larger man. Finally, it could probably be said that she’s now worse off than
she was because in establishing that power relationship she is a less independent person and, if the
interaction happened in a public environment, others are likely to view her as a less independent person
 also. They may even consider her to be of less moral significance than others and thus may feel as though
they themselves have permission to treat her in a similarly disrespectful manner.
4. •Langton, therefore, effectively formulates the following argument.
a. Where the speaker is an entity of sufficient authority;
b. And where the expression occurs under the right conditions;
c. The act of expression itself can have particular effect. What that effect will be, however, will depend
upon both the relative positions of the speaker and the what is spoken or expressed.
5. •Example: This House Would Cut All Government Funding For The Arts
6. •A government team might run the following argument.
a. Governments are the most powerful social actors both in a direct sense (they’re the only body that
can legitimately use coerce force) and a normative sense (they’re elected by the majority of
individuals therefore represent, at least in an approximate sense, the will of that majority). People,
therefore, care deeply about the things that governments say and the things that governments do.
b. Government decisions involve public money, are always controversial and, therefore tend to be well
publicised.
c. Government cannot fund all art projects as there is a limited pool of funds available. The art that
government chooses to fund is an expression of confidence and an endorsement of that artwork by
that government and, by extension, by the majority. The reverse is true of the art that the government
refuses to fund; it is an expression of a lack of confidence in that artwork and a disendorsement of it
by that government and the majority.
d. Government funding of the arts therefore entails two expressive acts – endorsement and
disendorsement.
i. Endorsement as an act;
i. Confers a false moral legitimacy upon the message that the artist is trying to convey. I.e.
it’s not clear why simply because the majority agrees with something it is necessarily right
to do so. Governments arbitrating in this way stratify artists into lesser and greater
categories. Since we lack an objective way of adjudicating on the quality of ideas or on the
quality of art this would be a task better left to individuals.
ii. Implicitly denies the legitimacy of the art that the government refused to fund. See next
section for harms.
ii. That act of expression (i.e. the disendorsement of that art) is itself an act that;
i. Rejects and denies the legitimacy of the art that the government has refused to fund.
That’s bad because given that most art is written with some sort of a political or social
message in mind, the government has effectively denied the legitimacy of the message
itself. That’s bad because given the normative power of government, society is likely to
interpret that as a condemnation of that particular agenda which, in turn, makes it harder
for the artist to send the message they were trying to send. This is particular harmful
where minority art and artists are concerned; they already have a very hard time getting
any traction with the majority as it is. An explicit government rebuke makes that ever
harder.
ii. Given that particular communities also often coalesce around particular art genres also,
the refusal to fund particular types of art can also be seen as an implicit rebuke of those
communities by the government also. For example, part of the appeal of “emo music” is
that it’s anti-majoritarian. The government extensively funds classical music but (at least in
the popular imagination, which is all that needs to be relevant for the purposes of this
discussion) would never extend funding to “emo”. That then is likely to intensify the
anti-social and negative tendencies of those groups as now the government has
expressed a refusal to engage with the art around which their communities are organised.
The upshot of that is likely to be a further distancing of those groups from the state;
unfortunate given the types of communities that are often in question and the conduct that
they engage in.
 7. •The argument obviously lives in debaterland to an extraordinary extent. It can work however though,
provided the causal links are drawn closely!
8. •Remember also that these arguments need not only be made where the expression has socially
undesirable results. The enactment of hate crime legislation, for instance, would arguably constitute a
speech act by government (and therefore by the majority) that empowers those who are likely to be victims
of hate crimes. That is, that as a speech act, enacting hate crime legislation delegitimises hateful groups
and their agendas.
9. •Additionally, a single act is not needed for this theory to work – a state of affairs is valid enough also. For
instance, the continuing legalisation of prostitution is often cited as an act of expression by government
endorsing the continuing political and social inferiority of women.
10. •Finally, this analysis implicitly underlies much which is often said about the difficult time that members of
minority groups have in getting their agenda taken seriously. This analysis is my own but is based loosely
on John Stuart Mill and Tim Scanlon.
a. The purpose of the right to free speech is to allow individuals to contribute to public discourse. In
doing so, it is hoped that both the individual will benefit by being able to advance their interests and
that society will benefit by having as many views as possible up for discussion and debate, with
something close to the truth eventually emerging.
b. The necessary precondition for that purpose to be fulfilled is that each speaker be taken equally
seriously. I.e. if a speaker is not treated with the same degree of respect as any other speaker, their
views will enter the “marketplace of ideas” at an immediate disadvantage because they are unlikely to
be given either a fair hearing by the audience or their meaning might be distorted by a pre-existing
perception that society has of the speaker.
c. The only way that that equality between ideas can ever be realised is if the speakers themselves are
treated as moral equals
d. The problem, however, is that that equality doesn’t exist. A proponent of racial equality, for instance,
might argue that society has subordinated a particular minority group to such an extent that their
inequality colours everything that is said by them. The over-reporting of certain minority criminal
offences, for instance (something free speech seems to demand we permit), might be said to cause
all their attempts to legitimately enter public discourse to be distorted. For instance, a political
advocate for a minority has to not only compete ideologically with all other views but must also
struggle against the disadvantage he experiences that (in certain contexts) he’s likely to be dismissed
out of hand purely by virtue of his membership of that minority.
e. If the views are distorted or dismissed, it cannot be said that the victims of the distortion have a right
to free speech equal with that of every other person because persons in the majority can expect to
have an effect given to their words that the person’s in the minority cannot.
f. At that point, the acts of free speech that perpetuate the distortion of that minority’s views themselves
undermine the purpose of free speech. The continuing negative social percpetions they generate
deprive the individual the capacity to advance their interests and tdeny the majority access to the
minority’s contribution to discourse. The letter of the right to free speech is used to defeat the
purpose. That’s incoherent and a prima facie case for limiting that particular act of expression.

Self-Respect
Self-Respect is one of those goods to which debaters tend to appeal, but frequently fail to explain. It’s relatively
easy to claim that anything from a demeaning job to being subject to anti-religious rhetoric is likely to diminish
one’s self-respect. What’s harder is explaining the significance of self-respect. This post will draw upon the work
of John Rawls and Jonathan Wolff to explain the value of self-respect, what self-respect requires, the relationship
between the level of respect that a person experiences socially and the respect that one has for oneself, and
some ways in which one’s self-respect can suffer. If you’re interested, references are at the bottom. Quick note
about terminology. For the sake of expediency, I’ve used a bit of philosophical terminology in this post. If you’re
going to try and use these arguments in a debate, try to steer away from using the labels as they’re likely to make
your argument seem more difficult to follow and abstracted away from the debate.
Self-Respect

Self-respect is an essential precondition for individual flourishing. Rawls argues that, self-respect has two parts;
1. 1.A person’s sense of their own value. A sense that their own lives are worthwhile and that the projects
they’re pursuing are worth carrying out. A person that does not value their own life is unlikely to
meaningfully buy into any of the things they pursue and are unlikely to lead a life as good as they might
have as a result. We won’t enjoy the things that we do.
2. 2.Confidence in one’s ability to fulfil one’s intentions. If you lack confidence you’re either unlikely to try and
give voice to your intentions at all, or you’re likely to be plagued by self-doubt when you do. Either way, your
capacity to live a meaningful life is undermined.

A lack of either of these is likely to lead to us having a less fulfilling life than we might otherwise have had. That’s
an obvious harm. If we’re concerned at all with the quality of life that individuals lead (either on individualist
grounds, or on equalitarian grounds), we obviously need to be concerned with self-respect.

Therefore, a typical (and, I think, quite plausible) egalitarian argument for the promotion of self-respect might run
as follows.
1. 1.It is of objectively equal importance that all lives flourish.
2. 2.Each person is therefore entitled to an equal share in the resources needed to lead a flourishing life. They
should have access to these resources regardless of the morally arbitrary (race, religion, colour, age etc…).
3. 3.To lead a flourishing life, it is essential that a person has access to the bases of self-respect.
a. 1.Explain the reasons why self-respect matters.
4. 4.Therefore the state should guarantee that every person has equal access to the bases of self-respect.

However, in almost every debate, it would never be enough to stop here. Rather, you would need to go on and
show why the particular policy you’re either defending or critiquing does or does not promote self-respect.

Before we briefly consider some suggestions to this end from Rawls and Wolff, crucial to establish is the
relationship between the respect that others have for an individual, and the self-respect that that individual is
likely to have for themselves. The way that we feel about ourselves will be significantly coloured by the extent to
which we feel as though we are respected as a moral equal by the rest of society. If we don’t feel as though
others value us it seems intuitively right that we’d start to question why that is. It’s likely that we’ll locate some
failing in ourselves as the answer. The result must necessarily be a loss of self-respect, as we’ll feel as though
we are lacking in value, and possibly as though we lack the capacity to carry through our intentions.

Rawls

Rawls argues that in order to have a sense of our own value (i.e. the first part of self-respect), we need two
things.
a. Firstly, a rational plan of life that satisfies the Aristotelian principle. The Aristotelian principle (in a
nutshell) is that human beings enjoy the exercise of their realised capacities. The greater the level of
realisation, or the greater the complexity of the task, the more the enjoyment rises.
i. When activities fail to satisfy the Aristotelian principle we’re not likely to perceive them to be
worth doing. If we’ve not been given the choice but to accept activities that aren’t meaningful,
we’re likely to begin to feel that we ourselves aren’t meaningful either.
b. Secondly, recognition from others that our person and projects are appreciated and affirmed by
others.
i. The extent to which others recognise and appreciate what we do is likely to be a function of the
extent to which they recognise our activities as valuable/pleasurable/worthy of respect.

Wolff

Wolff’s general thesis is that the egalitarian ‘ethos’ is grounded in the values of fairness and respect. These two
goods can come into conflict, and egalitarians may be forced to accept the possibility of a world where neither
value is fully implemented. More relevantly for our purposes, however, is Wolff’s analysis of respect. Wolff
outlines three ways in which we can lose self-respect.
i. Failures of common courtesy. A person is not respected if they are denied the usual social
graces.
ii. Failures of trust. To maintain self-respect, it is important that we feel as though we aren’t acting
randomly, but rather in a reasoned fashion. However, it is insulting to be called upon frequently
to justify one’s actions. It seems to suggest that one has something to hide, or is seeking an
unjustifiable advantage. This expresses a lack of trust in that person which, in turn suggests that
that person is not respected.
iii. Shameful revelation. Instances where people are forced to act in ways that will reduce the level
of respect that others have for them.

Where we’re likely, therefore, to fail in common courtesy, to make it appear as though a person is not trusted (at
least up to a reasonable threshold), or where we force people into shameful revelation, we lower the extent to
which that person is respected. That’s then likely to reduce that person’s self-respect (see above).

Two final things to remember. Firstly, these are all just general ways of characterising specific actions, and that
multiple failings of respect can occur in the same iteration. For instance, a person who is forced to work in a
minimum wage job that’s not valued by the rest of society is likely to feel as though their work does not at all
exercise their realised capacities, is likely to feel as though others do not regard their activities or person as
worthwhile, may be likely to experiences failures of common courtesy and may feel as though the fact that they’re
in that particular job is itself shamefully revealing their lack of capacity to work in a more meaningful job. Looking
at the same action in different ways can often be a really useful way to provide a greater depth of analysis.
Secondly, a wide variety of debating topics raise issues of respect (media, social policy, welfare, law, tax,
refugees etc…). This analysis is therefore very generally applicable and can be related to lots of debates.

Rational Actors
When debating, you’re almost certainly going to be required to show that a particular set of factors will lead the
actors with which the debate is concerned to pursue a particular course of action (i.e. given that variable a is 1
and variable b is 2, the actor’s chosen pattern of conduct will be z). There are of course a wide array of different
ways to try and do so. By far the strongest and most analytically sound of these methods is to seek to
demonstrate that a particular course of action would be rational for the actors in question to pursue. I’ll first offer a
few examples of the various approaches possible, and typical lines of attack possible against each. In doing so I’ll
hopefully demonstrate that the rational actor approach is the most sound. I’ll then step through how to make a
rational actor argument in more detail and, finally, provide a few typical worked examples. As always, the
arguments made here are only for the purposes of example, they do not necessarily reflect my opinion or the
opinions of the Macquarie University Debating Society!

The Different Approaches Examined

For this section, we’ll use the possible two-state resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine as our
example. You certainly don’t need a whole lot of facts for the purposes of this discussion, but the basic gist of the
idea is as follows: the territory upon which the state of Israel is currently located is disputed between the Israelis
and the Palestinians. This has lead to a protracted, often violent conflict. An oft-proposed solution is to graft two
states out of the area; one for the Israelis, one for the Palestinians. I’m going to offer number of different
examples of arguments to show why Israel won’t agree to a two-state solution.

The Argument From Authority: The situation is hopeless. The 2012 FRACYS report (not real) on the
Israel-Palestine conflict reported that, and I quote, “there is no prospect of a two-state solution. Israel will simply
not accept it as an eventuality.”

This is an obvious attempt to deputise someone else’s credibility into your own argument. Unless you’re literally
quoting from the actor in question (e.g. the head of the US Federal Reserve said this week that he “will not be
engaging in further quantitative easing”, as such the American congress will act to recapitalise their ailing banks
or risk economic catastrophe) this isn’t a strong strategy. Firstly, it’s bad debating. It’s entirely possible that
someone else could have read a different source and quote from them in the debate. The adjudicator has no way
of deciding between the two teams on this particular point as he’s been presented with two equally useless
references from either side that clash, but do not engage with one another on substance. Secondly, and more
importantly, quoting from someone else does nothing to establish the validity of the point itself. It simply attaches
a label to an assertion. This means at least two things. (1) A judge will give little credit to an argument that a
speaker does not themselves establish because the actual work of proving the argument hasn’t been done. The
introduction and conclusion of the argument has simply been stated, never established. (2) These arguments are
easily overcome by the most basic analysis. For instance: “we reject the opposition’s assertion that Israel will
never accept a two-state solution. We actually think that given that much of Israel’s economy depends upon
exports, and upon research and development, the results of which are often sold internationally to places such as
the EU, Israel’s increasing international isolation over its refusal to meaningfully address the Palestinian question
will eventually harm its capacity to pursue its interests internationally as less actors become willing to deal with
them. This harms Israel’s interests far more than granting Palestinian statehood over territory for which they have
little practical use and ending a centuries-old conflict.” Though each of the points in the previous sentence are
easily refutable, that analysis is far more valuable than the quote.

The Rhetorical Approach (Fact-Bombing): Israel is surrounded by states hostile to its very existence. Israel has
blockaded Gaza and repressed thousands of innocent Palestinians. Israel cares only for those within its borders,
and nothing for how much its actions may bring suffering upon others. Israel has the most aggressive foreign
policy in the world. The Palestinians have walked away from too many deals with Israel for them to be taken
seriously. Why would anything ever change in that context The status quo will stay in place, and no two-state
solution will ever be accepted by Israel.

The basic strategy here is to seek to present a few facts (or more often than not, debaterfacts [often not actually
facts]), usually forcefully, and then hope that doing so will persuade an audience of your point of view. This is
obviously a weak approach to argumentation. Though it is of course valuable to characterise a situation in a
manner which makes your arguments seem relevant or important (in other words, providing an imperative), doing
so will not prove an argument logically sound. To draw upon the above example, the first five sentences of the
argument are, to differing extents, assertions. As such, most adjudicators will give them little weight. Solid
oppositions will either ignore them or present facts to the contrary. They successfully (maybe…) paint a picture of
a bad status quo. They do not, however, establish why Israel will continue to perpetuate that status quo. The sixth
sentence is a rhetorical question and, again, is worthless argumentatively. The characterisation in the previous
five sentences suggested that the problem is serious. Asking a rhetorical question simply invites the audience to
despair a little bit and plays on their intuition. It does not, however establish why they should feel that way. As
such, the concluding sentence (the thing that you actually had to prove) isn’t linked up to anything analytically
useful.

The Historical Approach: Israel has always been hostile to a two-state solution; that’s why they’re building
settlements in the West Bank and refuse to deal with Hamas. History teaches us that this is not a conflict which
will be resolved; the divisions between Jews and Muslims, between Arabs and Israelis are simply too deep. Israel
will never deal with the Palestinians and, as such, will always reject a two-state model.

Again; a poor approach. The fact that something has historically been the case goes little distance to proving that
it will continue to be the case. At best it might establish that a particular pattern of conduct has momentum (and
thus may be likely to recur), but even then, that could hardly constitute a sufficient explanation. At least in
debaterland, actors continue to make choices for a wide variety of reasons, backward-looking, contemporaneous,
forward-looking and (less tangibly) ideological. Arguments from history at best explain the backward-looking
aspects of the decision making calculus of the actor in question. They beg the question as to why particular
events took place. To be argumentatively useful in even a minimal sense, an argument from history must recount
events (last week John went to the shops to buy himself an apple for lunch), analyse the conditions which gave
rise to those events (i.e. tell us why – John did so because his house was empty of food, the shops were
relatively close and, as a vegetarian, an apple seemed an acceptable option from the few available choices), and
show that the situation at issue in the debate is analogous (one week later, John is again hungry for lunch, he
lives in the same place, the shops are still open and he’s still a vegetarian) and, as such, will yield an analogous
result (John will go to the shops and buy some kind of fruit for lunch).

Even still, however, this process of analysis lacks one crucial element. It may show that the situation has not
changed, it does not, however, establish that the actions taken will be undertaken again. This is because it does
not show that it makes rational sense for action to recur. It shows only that it’s possible that it might. It does not,
however, really get to the motivations of the actors concerned and as such cannot establish that given the same
set of conditions, that will act in the same fashion again.
The Rational Actor Approach: Israel has an interest in guaranteeing its security. It is also surrounded by hostile
neighbours. It pursues this interest by adopting an aggressive strategic posture (see the 2006 invasion of
Lebanon, the 2007 strikes upon Syrian nuclear facilities, or the 2009 invasion of Gaza) in order to deter all who
might seek to encroach upon Israeli territory or assets. It is also in Israel’s interests to retain control over as much
territory as possible in order to give it a strategic advantage should any of its often hostile neighbours attack.
Accepting a two-state solution would firstly weaken the perception of Israel as an actor with the capacity to act
unilaterally (i.e. they would have made a concession to an opposing group, in this case Hamas [whom it
considers a terror organisation] and Fatah) and secondly would result in them surrendering territory (some of
which Hamas would gain greater control over were they to be granted statehood). Both these eventualities would
undermine Israel’s security interests. As such, it will not accept a two-state solution.

The strengths of this approach are obvious. It’s first and most obvious strength is that it does what the historical
argument failed to do – it discusses the motivations of the actors in question and then shows why the emergent
social conditions will cause them to act in a particular way. In the argument above, as with most rational actor
arguments, this is done in four steps. Firstly it states Israel’s interests (if you’ve not heard the term used this way
before, think of interests as like goals that actors pursue and maintain once achieved), then it states the pattern
of conduct pursued by Israel in order to achieve that objective. It then states why introducing a new element into
the situation (in this case granting Palestinians statehood) would undermine Israel’s chosen pattern of conduct
and thus why it would not be in Israel’s interests to accept a two-state solution. Derivatively, the second strength
of the rational-actor approach to argumentation is that it relies upon a logically reasonable assumption: that
actors will choose, from a variety of possible courses of action, those which maximise their self-interest. As is
often observed, in reality this may or may not be the case given that human beings are the ones making the
decisions and are both fallible and persuadable (i.e. they might act for ideological or altruistic reasons rather than
self-interested reasons; or they might make daft decisions). This then raises two important issues. Firstly, this
objection is difficult to sustain in debating, simply because it’s very hard to establish, logically, why anyone would
act against their own interests. Secondly, what really matters in making these arguments is showing that a
particular actor perceives that a particular course of action would maximise its perceived interests. Thus, it may
not in fact be in Israel’s interests to continue rejecting the two-state model. So long as it continues to perceive
that this is the case, however, they’re very likely to continue doing so.

Typical lines of attack against rational-actor arguments usually try one of three strategies. Firstly, a team can try
to show that a particular actor is irrational and will thus undertake a different course of action in line with their
irrational motivations. It is often argued (and often argued badly), for instance, that terror organisations are
ideologically driven and as such are irrational. This then means that even threatening to behave very violently
towards them unless their change their conduct will have no effect. Attacking them will undermine their interests
but it won’t do anything to change their original, ideological motivations. These arguments are difficult to sustain
but can work effectively with enough detail and persuasive analysis as to why that actor is irrational. The second
approach is to argue that the opposing team has in some way misconstrued the actual interests of the actor in
question and as such they will act in a different way, given their actual interests. The third approach is to accept
the interests of the actor as outlined by the opposition, but argue that another pattern of conduct exists that would
better maximise those interests. Either way; what ought to be clear here is that this is a rational-actor approach
will lead to both more persuasive analysis, and better debates as there is a genuine opportunity for engagement
at an analytical level, as opposed to the previous approaches.

How to Make a Rational-Actor Argument

Firstly, let’s adopt the following provisional definition of a rational actor: a rational actor is an actor that has ends
and takes the most efficient means to those ends. Effectively – a rational actor will choose that course of action
which, of all available courses of action, maximises their interests (or “ends”). Making a rational-actor argument
effectively requires four steps. As we go through, we’ll make a typical argument to show why the Pakistani state
will continue to sponsor the Taliban in Afghanistan.
1. State that the actor in question is in fact a rational in the aforementioned sense.
a. Pakistan is a rational actor. It will choose that course of action which best maximises its interests.
2. State the interests of that actor.
a. Pakistan has an interest in maintaining its national security. It therefore has an interests in being able
to control (or at least contain) the power of their Western neighbour (Afghanistan) and to minimise the
influence of their Eastern neighbour (India).
 b. Pakistan’s rulers also have an interest in pursuing policies that harmonise with the preferences of their
population in the hope of becoming re-elected.
3. Show why the action in question will maximise the interests of the actor in question.
a. Given their fairly dysmal performance thus far, Pakistan does not believe that the West will win the
war in Afghanistan. Rather it believes that Afghanistan will eventually return to Taliban control. Given
that Pakistan wishes to contain and control Afghanistan, it makes sense to seek influence within the
group it one day thinks will be in control of that state again – the Taliban. Moreover, it sees the
emerging government in Afghanistan as friendly to Indian interests (if only because, slightly
paradoxically, it is naturally hostile to Pakistan’s government for funding the Taliban). To guarantee its
national security, therefore, Pakistan has an obvious interest in continuing to fund and support the
Taliban in Afghanistan.
b. The majority of Pakistanis are anti-USA, at least moderately Islamic (though it should be noted not
radical) and are strongly anti-colonialism. As such, there is a signficant degree of sympathy for the
Afghani Taliban amongst Pakistan’s population.
4. State that, therefore, the relevant course of action will occur.
a. Thus, Pakistan will continue to support the Afghani Taliban because it is in their interests to continue
doing so.
2. Just to be clear, there’s nothing normative here (i.e. there’s no element of whether or not something is
morally or pragmatically a good or bad thing). Establishing that every actor has a right to maximise their self
interests is another issue entirely. Thus, this style of argumentation ought only be used when trying to show
that something will occur or explaining why something does occur. It should not be used, however, to justify
anything. For instance, in a motion that required the affirmative team to sanction Russia, the opposition
would almost certainly argue that the rational Russian response would be to threaten Western interests
within its sphere of influence. It is, of course, undesirable that Russia would do so, yet it is rational for them
to. A typical use of a rational-actor argument, therefore, looks like this;
1. Normative Statement
a. Western interests in Asia are important for x, y and z reasons.
2. Rational actor analysis.
a. Sanctioning Russia will lead it to threaten those interests. The above rational-actor structure fits in
here.
3. Normative conclusion
a. Therefore we should not sanction Russia.

Final Example: The Self-Regulating Market

This argument seeks to show that markets can regulate their own conduct, free from government intervention.
Here’s how it goes.The argument will follow the two outlines from above.
1. Normative Statement: Government is only legitimate in regulating conduct insofar as it is necessary to
prevent harm to others. In all other instances, individuals ought to be left free to make their own decisions
as it’s not clear why anyone else has the right to intervene if their conduct affects no-one else. As such, if it
can be demonstrated that corporations are competently able to self-regulate and safeguard consumers in
that fashion, the government has no right to act.
2. Rational Actor Analysis
a. Corporations are rational actors that seek to maximise their self-interest wherever possible.
b. Corporations have an interest in long-term profitability. That necessarily involves the protection of the
resources that they need to make their product (i.e. if they destroy it all, they won’t have a business in
the future), and the protection of consumers whom they sell their product to (if they harm their
consumers, consumers will refuse to purchase from them and the company will have no clients).
c. As such, corporations, if left to their own devices, will always act sustainably vis a vis the resources
they use and those to whom they sell. To adopt any other course of action would be to undermine
their own long-term interests.
d. As such, corporations have an interest in behaving responsibly and do not require regulation.
 3. Normative conclusion: because corporations have an interest in self-regulation, government intervention is
unnessecary.

Microeconomics
In a typical microeconomics debate, two teams will argue for alternate means of meeting the same social need.
Principled analysis will always be relevant (especially where the debate will involve government intervention in
the private sector). However, in this guide, we’ll consider the logical basis of all microeconomics debates –
analysis of economic competition. We’ll first sketch an outline of economic competition and then we’ll explore two
specific issues that the analysis plays into – privatisation and self-regulation. The thing to keep in mind for all
economics debates is that pragmatic market analysis is only worthwhile if you can demonstrate how
improvements in the way that markets work has an impact upon individual or social wellbeing. Citing efficiency or
productivity as goods in themselves won’t win you a debate. Citing efficiency and productivity as they impact
upon society more broadly will.
Economic Competition
•Premise: both individuals and firms are rational, self-interested actors. That is, that they have self interested
objectives and pursue the most efficient means of achieving them.
•The rational, self-interested consumer (I use the term loosely to mean either a collective or an individual)
demands the best value for their money. If confronted with a discretionary spending choice, the consumer will
always choose with their best interests as their foremost consideration.
oFor instance, A, B, and C are all products that are designed to perform the same function. A is $5 but is an
inferior product, likely to break soon after it is put to work. B is $20 but is likely to last at least five years. If it
breaks before then, the manufacturer promises to replace it free of charge. C is $100 and has all the
characteristics of B, but is painted a more attractive colour. Assuming that the consumer had no profitable need
of C’s colour and did not only need to product once and for a very brief period, this model of competition suggests
that the rational consumer will choose product B.
oNote that the claim is not that consumers are always rational, only that at a sufficient level of abstraction, the
choices that actors make will at least follow an approximate pattern of rationality.
•Rational, self-interested firms exist principally to make profit. A firm must both pay input costs and provide
income for those who own the business. Businesses will seldom operate at a loss because it is not in the
individuals’ behind the company’s interest to do so. Long-term, operating at a loss is impossible (the reserves of
money being used to fund the firm must inevitably deplete unless profit is being made).
•Producers therefore have two objectives
oThe basic making of income – survival mechanism.
oThe maximisation of profits – the more profit you make, the better the return for everyone with a self-interested
stake in the company.
•All markets are limited in the sense that there is a finite number of consumers and hence a finite level of demand
for all products and services. Where there are multiple firms in the market competing for the same consumers,
there is a need for firms to positively differentiate themselves from one other.
•In attempting to do so, firms seek to appeal to the consumers’ demand for value. This means that firms do two
things.
oImprove the quality of their services or product.
oMake their services cheaper by maximising efficiency and productivity.
•This process is cyclical. So long as there are multiple players in a market, the risk that one will overtake the
other exists. Corporations therefore are always engaged competition with one another. Assuming that other
factors remain stable, the standard and value (as in value-for-money) of products and services ought to be
always improving.
Privatisation
Probably the most common type of microeconomics debate is privatisation (either the government employing a
corporate actor to discharge its functions, or the sale of some kind of a public service or asset to the private
sector). The central clash in these debates, therefore, is usually about who can do the best job of discharging that
service. We won’t consider here the arguments in favour of state ownership as they can be found elsewhere in
the matter file (see the social contract for one example). All we’ll do is sketch out the procedure for mounting a
privatisation argument.
•The key to privatisation is that you give a corporate entity a “stake” in how something gets done; something a
government does not have. This then means that the needs of consumers will always be better met under the
private sector.
•Step one – what is the status quo
oX service is operated by the government.
•Step two – what’s bad about government ownership
oGovernments always offer at best a mediocre level of service because there is no impetus for a bureaucracy to
innovate or to lower costs. This is because governments aren’t in competition with any other actor. There is no
threat to their existence and they have no concern about protecting their market share. That means that they’re
inevitably less efficient because if costs blow out, the taxpayer absorbs the harm. Similarly, there’s no incentive
for them to achieve any of their goals because if they fail to meet policy objectives, they can’t be removed and
replaced with another provider. This then makes the government unaccountable for any problems that arise.
Whereas the private sector must act to protect their market share, governments can ignore problems.
oSimilarly, the public service does not get rewarded for doing a job better than a private corporation.
oThe problems inherent in government ownership are creating harms – explain them.
For instance, the current public ownership of the gaol system entrenches high rates of recidivism because for all
the government policy written around improving them, no gaol actually has an incentive to try and achieve those
goals. There’s no reward for them if they succeed and no negative consequences if they fail.
•Step 3: Why privatisation will offer a superior service.
oFirms have an incentive to offer a service of maximal quality and efficiency. Governments always lack this
incentive and as a result . When an industry is open to the private sector, there are multiple firms competing for a
limited market.
oThese firms have two objectives
The basic making of income – survival mechanism.
Maximisation of profits.
oWith a limited market therefore, there is a need for firms to positively differentiate themselves from each other.
They seek to do so by attempting to meet the demands of their market as best they can.
oIn attempting to do so, two things happen.
Services get better through innovation.
Services get cheaper through a drive for efficiency and productivity.
oThis is a perpetual process – so long as competition doesn’t end, neither will the drive for efficiency or
innovation.
oThe end of this is that needs are more effectively met by corporate actors because those actors are not viable
unless they provide a service that continually improves.
oThen explain specifically which benefits you think that privatisation will provide.
Again with gaols, firms competing for the right to operate goals will inevitably seek to win government contracts.
They’ll do so by coming up with ever-superior ways of meeting government objectives. The problem of recidivism
is an entrenched one where new ideas are desperately needed. The only actors with the incentive to generate
and implement those ideas are corporate actors.
•General advice on modeling privatisation.
oYou don’t want to hand total lassiez faire control of a particular essential government service to corporate actors
(see market failure).
oInstead, you need to stand behind government awarded contracts.
oRenewing those government contracts should be contingent upon successfully meeting the objectives of
whatever system you’re privatising.
Eg. in a prison privatisation debate, you might set the objectives as lowering rates of recidivism, improving
rehabilitation, curtailing prisoner violence, educational achievement etc…
oIncentivise performance with
The renewal of the contract.
Performance bonuses.
oContracts can be terminated at the government’s option at any time.
oThere needs to be a regular process of oversight and review to make sure that the objectives are in fact being
met.
•Objections abound to this line of thought. One of the most common objections is that of market failure.
Self-Regulation
This line of analysis seeks to show that corporate actors are likely to also be socially responsible actors. I’ve just
sketched the basic argument here.
•The private sector only acts in ways that will maximise its own interests (survival and profitability).
•The private sector’s income stream is usually contingent upon a particular resource (e.g. fisherman will make no
money if there are no fish to catch any more). Corporate actors therefore have the greatest possible stake in the
responsible use of resources because using them irresponsibly will lead to the long-term demise of their
enterprise
•The private sector therefore has no incentive to act in ways that will actively destroy its future viability. Where
corporations have an interest in the protection of a resource, they are likely to act responsibly. It’s not in their
interests to do otherwise.
oFor instance, recent trends in tourism represent a move away from conventional tourism and a move toward
ecotourism. This represents recognition of the fact that the destruction of the natural environment is also the
destruction of the basis of the tourism industry. Solution: do tourism in an environmentally responsible fashion.
•Challenges to this argument are manifold. Here’s just two;
oCorporate actors don’t get to think about their long-term calculus because they’re always focused upon their
short-term share price as a way to deliver the best return to their shareholders. The short-term share price is
determined by the level of confidence people have in that company. That confidence is a function of short-term
profitability. Long-term responsibility never gets considered.
oThis problem is compounded by the fact that corporations generally exist in competitive marketplaces. If one
person chooses to act responsibly, it doesn’t mean that all the others will. Other corporations will gain at the
expense of the responsible actor. No-one wants to suffer that first-mover disadvantage and so no-one will do the
responsible thing, even if they recognise that in an ideal world it would be in their long-term interest.

Market Failure
Market failure arguments are standard in economics debates, especially in debates concerning government
ownership or privatisation. The thrust of the concept is that markets are sometimes a suboptimal way of filling a
social need.
1. •For instance, the American healthcare system is a failed market because the operation of that market has
meant that access to healthcare is very difficult and costs are extremely high. Many Americans cannot
afford health insurance. This leaves them significantly worse off than they might be if they were able to
access it from a government.
2. •There are also good examples of markets that would fail unless the government was filling the gap. For
example – national defence could never be privatised because there’d be bits of Australia that it would be
egregiously unprofitable to defend and the private sector would have no incentive to do it. It’s also likely that
they would try and cut corners in pursuit of maximal profitability – again unfortunate where the defence of
the nation is concerned. Other good (though frequently) examples are education (i.e. it would never be
profitable to educate people in remote Aboriginal communities etc… so we have to have the government
there to fund it), healthcare, law enforcement etc…
3. •The argument itself is in two sections – principled and practical. It is possible to succeed by running only
the practical side of the argument, however the principled dispute is more interesting and a strong position
to adopt.

Principled Analysis
1. •Principle 1: insert some analysis on why the particular social good in question is essential for everyone.
Equality’s a pretty bog standard one here (i.e. equal concern means that everyone must have the right to
 lead a good life, regardless of arbitrary factors about that person, that then implies that all persons must
have the right to access particular institutions such as public health etc…)
2. •Principle 2: the circumstances in which we curtail market operations. Optimal social conditions occur when
demand for basic necessities (i.e. those goods required to meet whatever moral obligation you set up
[probably some sort of equality]) meets supply. That is where all those who require access to the relevant
goods and services are able to access them. We usually like free markets because they are generally the
most efficient and fair way of distributing those social goods. Competition in those markets also generally
means that they are the most cost-effective way of distributing those goods also. The important thing,
however, is that our liking for markets is strictly utilitarian – we like them because they do good things. They
are not ends in themselves. If it could be demonstrated that an alternate method of meeting the social need
in question would do so in a fashion superior to that of the market, we ought to endorse that alternative.
3. •Therefore it follows that where government could meet the needs of its citizens better than the private
sector (i.e. where there would be a market failure), the government ought to provide those goods.

Practical Analysis: Why Markets Fail

1. •Businesses are self-interested actors that will always seek to maximise their profits. This drive, in certain
circumstances, is socially undesirable.
a. The problem of access (note: not a real economics term) occurs where the factors conspire to make a
particular market or sector of a market unprofitable. For instance, the remoteness of certain Aboriginal
communities in the Northern Territory, coupled with the limited financial capacity of individuals in those
communities, means that the private sector will never provide healthcare at an adequate level in those
communities because it is unprofitable to do so.
b. The problem of cost (again, not a real economics term). This occurs where there is a shortage of
supply in a particular market. The result is that providers are able to charge excessively for services.
Aside from high equipment costs, surgery is an expensive undertaking because there is a very high
demand for surgical procedures but a very short supply of surgeons. That then means that there is
very little competition. That drives prices up because the surgeons know that they can ask almost
whatever they want for their services because the consumer, effectively, has no alternative.
c. The problem of inefficiency (see above disclaimers). This problem occurs in industries that it is
impossible to profit from (think, perhaps, the maintenance of a defensive military – keeping a lot of
men on standby and in shape doesn’t bring in revenue, despite the fact that it’s essential that it
happens). In these cases, private companies will either do a very bad job performing their role in the
market because they’ll be trying to cut corners to improve profitability or they’ll simply not enter the
market at all which leaves consumers without access to the particular service.
2. Joining this up with the debate, if you can establish that (1) there is a moral imperative to provide a
particular service, that (2) the market is only acceptable insofar as it actually succeeds in providing that
service adequately (i.e. at whatever level you’ve claimed was essential in point (1)) and (3) that it will not
provide this service for structural reasons, prima facie, you have a case for government intervention. Bear
in mind, however that you will then have to go on to do analysis as to why the government is better
equipped to meet the need in question than the private sector. Pointing out that governments don’t have a
profit motive and therefore can do unprofitable things is a good place to start. Pointing out, also, that
governments can coercively centralise resources and planning etc…(something that’s not available so long
as the private sector continues to be both available and more attractive than the public sector as an option
for providers) is also probably going to be useful.

Harm Minimization
Harm minimisation arguments are at the centre of many social policy debates. The idea, as it sounds, is to
establish that a particular course of action will minimise the harms inherent in a particular social phenomenon. It
is most typically (though not always) applied to debates about banning or legalising different practices, and so I’ll
focus on that in this article. In its most typical formulation, a harm minimisation argument requires you to prove
four premises. I will take the topic “This House Would Allow the CIA to Torture Terror Suspects” as my model for
this case.
1. •Essential fact: the status quo.
a. Torture is illegal.
 2. •Firstly, that a particular type of conduct will take place regardless of legal sanction and why this is the case.
a. Alan Dershowitz, for instance, has argued that torture will inevitably take place regardless of legal
prohibitions because the agents who have to choose whether or not to torture will inevitably regard
the threat of a legal sanction that may or may not be enforced as less important than the good they
could achieve by extracting information through interrogational torture.
3. •Secondly, that on that basis, the principled side of the discussion is less important than the practical. That
is, that regardless of one’s moral conception of a particular type of conduct, if it is inevitable that that
conduct will occur, the reasonable person ought to prefer the option that minimises harm. We can regret
immoral conduct, but if we can’t prevent it we’d be much better served by trying to minimise the damage
that it causes.
a. To continue the previous example, torture is clearly a regrettable, and almost certainly immoral,
practice. However, if we can’t stop people torturing, surely we’d be better off putting aside questions of
principle and asking how best we could reduce either the amount or severity of torture.
4. •Thirdly, harms are occurring as a result of the absolute prohibition of the conduct in question. That is, that
the illegality of the conduct is causing harm. You probably want to point to a couple of harms occurring, in
the interests of brevity I’ve only included one here.
a. The fact that torture is illegal but happening extralegally creates a number of harms. For instance, it’s
impossible to regulate illegal conduct because the law that regulated it would contradict the law and
banned it. That’s unfortunate even within torture there are degrees of violence (e.g. playing someone
loud music for a long period of time is obviously less harmful than waterboarding or brutal physical
assault). It’s obvious that we ought to minimise the amount of violence in any torture scenario. The
only way to do that is to have legal sanctions and official oversight, both of which are only possible
when governments can legislate on the issue. The only way that they’re going to be able to do that is
once the absolute prohibition is removed.
5. •Fourthly, that therefore, through a process of legalisation, those harms could be alleviated.
a. Again in the torture discussion, the worst kind of torture is unregulated torture performed by agents
answerable to no one. Regulation would mean that not only could we develop guidelines around the
types of minimal torture we’d accept but also that more people could be present (officials responsible
for reporting to higher authority on the manner in which the torture is conducted and doctors among
them). That then to a certain extent alleviates the harms pointed to above.
6. •Therefore, we should legalise whatever the debate happens to be.

Note; further to point three, if you’re stuck for some arguments here, try some of these.
1. •The absence of regulation (see above).
2. •Unenforceability. Certain laws cannot be universally enforced. For instance, laws that ban the possession
of drugs are hard to enforce because the problem is incredibly widespread and the drugs themselves are
often hidden and consumed in clandestine environments. That’s harmful because it hands police officers
universal discretion in those whom they seek to investigate. This leads to drastically inequitable outcomes.
For instance, in certain parts of California you are four times more likely to be stopped by police (and
maybe arrested, I don’t remember thus I don’t want to say for certain!) and searched for cannabis if you’re
black than if you’re white. The point is that in handing officers that type of discretion as to whom they
choose to target, they will inevitably discriminate between possible targets on the basis of their own
personal prejudices, hence the over-targeting of minorities etc… Another terrific example of this is that
when pornography was made illegal in Canada, the police only ever enforced the ban on gay pornography.
When you’re making this argument, don’t forget to prove why the law is necessarily unenforceable, before
going on to trash those who’ll be doing the enforcing.
3. •The illegality of particular forms of conduct alienates people from all forms of government. For instance,
individuals who are addicted to very hard drugs (or so you can argue in debaterland anyway) are likely to
have very minimal engagement with government services (e.g. health, education etc…). The problem with
that is that these individuals are clear examples of people with medical conditions who could seriously use
assistance. They’re unlikely to access those services because the only interaction that they’re likely to have
had with the state is with law enforcement officials who’re likely to have punished them for their drug habit.
Thus the fear of being caught, coupled with the resentment toward the state for the manner in which the
police treated them, means that they’re unlikely to seek out the assistance that they need and that the state
 could provide. The illegality of the drugs thus multiplies the disastrous health effects that they could have on
users.
4. •A lack of expertise. Doctors currently cannot perform active euthanasia. That doesn’t stop the patients
themselves wanting to die. The problem, therefore, is that where a doctor won’t perform the act, a family
member or friend very well might. That then means that, because that person lacks proper training, they’re
unlikely to do it in either the safest or the most pain-free manner possible. That’s harmful to the patient and
easily avoidable through legalisation.

‘Too Big to Fail’

Corporations that are “too big to fail” are corporations that are of such critical importance to economies that their
failure would result in harm of magnitude such that governments are effectively forced to rescue them to avert
disaster. Large American banks are perhaps the best example (it emerged in December 2011 that through the
course of the GFC, the US Federal Reserve had literally created $7.7 trillion, loaned it to the big banks at 0.01%
interest, and then allowed them to purchase US government bonds at 3% interest with the money, such is their
importance to the economy). Throughout the course of the GFC, congress passed a $700 billion act (TARP – the
Troubled Asset Relief Programme) to purchase the toxic assets of financial institutions to help keep them solvent,
and nationalised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (two enourmous mortgage brokers deeply implicated in the
subprime mortgage crisis) to stop them going broke and being forced to liquidate their assets and sell family
homes.
The basic argument against corporations that are too big to fail, therefore, is a moral hazard argument and works
like this;
•The success or failure of corporations affects a wide range of stakeholders – employees, investors, customers,
suppliers, governments, and the economy more broadly.
•Corporations act always with the maximisation of profit as their central objective. That then means that they
have to balance the profitability of a potential investment against the likelihood of that investment’s failure.
Corporations, generally, therefore, will make relatively sound investment decisions, because they’ve every
incentive to try and maximise the gains they make but not to the extent of betting on an asset that they’re likely to
lose money on.
•Risk, therefore, is an incredibly important stabilising force. So long as the longevity and profitability of a
corporation is not assured, they’re forced to make relatively sound investment decisions. That in turn, serves the
interests of all the stakeholders outlined above. Employees are guaranteed employment, investors have a
steadily growing company, customers get to choose between a number of competing firms, governments collect
steady tax revenues, and the economy expands.
•The problem, however, is that where a corporation becomes too big to fail, there’s no longer risk on anything like
the same scale as before. That’s because the failure of that corporation would be at a cost so extraordinary that
the government would be forced to rescue it. As such, these companies know that whatever investment decisions
they might make in search of windfall profits, they’re insulated from the potential costs of their mistakes; the
company can effectively survive anything.
•As such, they then have every incentive to invest irresponsibly. The harms of this are obvious;
oCorporations invest money badly, lose it, and are forced to extort money from the taxpayer to pay it back. Not
only is it money that they don’t deserve, but it is also punishes the taxpayer twice over; not only did do they suffer
everything becoming more expensive in times of financial crisis (i.e. as market certainty decreases, corporations
charge more to guarantee their bottom line), they also suffer being forced to surrender their own incomes to the
government to bail out irresponsible corporate actors.
oMoney goes to projects that should never have been started in the first place (e.g. subprime mortgages) that
only cause unnecessary suffering when they inevitably fail.
oThey also undermine confidence in the entire financial system, precisely because the system could be riddled
with bad assets that the government might be forced to rescue at any point.

Stability in Developing Nations

Most debates set in developing nations will raise the issue of stability in some way or other. Take the following
four quite different topics;
•This house would abolish all barriers to foreign direct investment (FDI) in the developing world. The question of
stability is live in this debate because foreign corporations that invest in developing nations tend to be willing to
move their operations from place to place in search of maximal profits in a way that local producers (often unable
to compete with foreign corporations on price) are not. That then means that the stability of those nations is
threatened, both because the predictability of that nation’s economic performance is fragile, and because foreign
direct investment in some contexts (though, to be clear, not all) tends to employ fewer people than less efficient
local production. This in turn creates a higher rate of unemployment which, in turn, threatens social stability. On
the other hand you might want to argue that the only way stability is likely to come in some contexts is with
economic development, and that the only way economic development is likely to come about in any significant
way is through FDI.
•This house would intervene militarily in Syria. Ousting the Assad regime and installing a democracy might create
more social stability in Syria with a government that was forced to be more responsive to its population, or it
might create less stability by causing regional conflict and giving rise to further sectarianism inside Syria itself
etc…
•This house would open all borders. Stability is an issue here because some nations are likely to experience
significant inflows of people, and others are likely to experience an exodus of people. Either way, the movement
of people has an obvious impact upon the stability of those nations.
•This house supports independence for Mindanao (a poor Muslim region in the primarily Christian Philippines).
Stability is in this debate at a wide array of levels – the stability of the Philippines if parts of the country that don’t
like the government’s performance can choose to secede, the stability of the international system if the
international community tolerates secessionist movements, the economic stability of Mindanao once it’s seceded
and is cut off from the resources of the Philippino government, the stability of the world economy once Mindanao
is independent and becomes responsible for policing a heavily used shipping region.
These are all fairly typical topics that all raise the question of stability. Three obvious questions present
themselves. What is stability, why is stability important, and how do we get it
What is Stability
Stability is a difficult term to pin down because its precise connotations shift with context. You’re probably safe,
however, to roughly equate it to favourable predictability. That is, that whatever the circumstances in question are
both minimally favourable, they’re not so volatile that they’re likely to rapidly deteriorate. A nation that had been at
war for a long time would be predictably violent, but this is obviously not what is intended by stability. A threshold
level of favourability (whatever that might mean in context) also seems to be implied by the concept. This idea
manifests itself at a number of levels. Here’s three ways of thinking about it;
•Social stability refers to the predictability and favourability of relations between individuals and communities
within a particular state. Consider, for instance, the frequent uprisings in the Caucasus region against the
Russian state. Social instability takes place at a number of levels. The two most typical in development debates
are ethnicity (see frequent ethnic conflict in many African states [e.g. Nigeria]), or sectarian (as in Iraq, between
Sunni and Shi-ite Muslims).
•Economic stability refers (unsurprisingly) to economic conditions such as supply (the number of firms in the
market and their production patterns), demand (what consumers in the relevant economic are willing to pay for),
price (inflation or deflation), regulation (the rules [or lack thereof] governing that economy) or capacity
(infrastructure, the resources available for businesses etc…) are minimally favourable, relative constant, and
unlikely to rapidly deteriorate.
•Stability in foreign relations refers to the extent to which relations between the states with which the debate is
concerned are minimally favourable (read: peaceful) and stable. Relations are stable between Australia and New
Zealand. Relations are unstable between Israel and most of its neighbours. This need not necessarily imply that
relations are friendly (relations between Russia and the USA aren’t always very friendly, but the presence of each
side’s nuclear arsenal has tended to contain conflict between them).
There is an obvious interdependency between these three things. A state fighting an external war against a
well-matched opponent obviously does not enjoy stability in its foreign relations, but is also likely to suffer a lack
of economic stability (both because the demands placed upon that economy will be atypical, and because
investors will tend to flee a nation fighting a war for fear of what might happen to their business in that nation as
the conflict progresses) and social stability (not everyone will support the war, in multi-ethnic states, some might
have sympathy with the nation at which the state has gone to war and begin violently resisting their government
or assisting the other side etc…).
Political stability (obviously of crucial importance) is discussed below.
Why is Stability Important
The best way to answer this question is to ask a metadebating question – why is anything important in a debate
Well, usually, the things taken to be important in debates are those which impact upon something that a
reasonable person would take to be significant in its own right. In almost every case, that will mean that things
are important where they impact upon the lives that people lead. The importance of stability, then, ought to be
thought of in terms of its impact upon the lives people lead.
A quick caveat here that these are extremely complex issues. I’m seeking here to offer only a general guide to
the usual directions these arguments follow in debates. I’m not for a second suggesting that what I offer here is a
definitive account of the importance of social, economic and foreign stability.
Social Stability
Charles Taylor famously argues that the capacity for individuals to develop, revise and pursue a conception of the
good is possible only in certain types of societies. Individuals’ interests are profoundly interdependent. Freedom
of choice, for instance, is partially socially determined. One cannot choose to become a hangman in a society
that does not practice the death penalty. Choices are defined (and constrained) by the options available to us in
the relevant context. Taylor goes on to develop a distinctive political philosophy from this insight, a sketch of
which is contained under the heading communitarianism in this article (some of which is relevant to development
contexts). His insight, however, is instrumentally useful to us in explaining the importance of both economic and
social stability. Stability matters because it plays a role in determining the quality of life that will be enjoyed by
people under different social conditions.
Social stability impacts deeply upon the lives individuals lead. In the most obvious sense, a stable social
environment is necessary if individuals are to be able to make meaningful choices about how to live. Making
choices of that nature requires reflection upon how individuals want to live. That reflection, however, is only a
useful exercise if the options open to that individual are themselves relatively constant. If social circumstances
are in flux, that will presumably impact upon which long-term choices individuals can make with any confidence
(because social circumstances might rapidly shift and remove or alter the option that they would like to have
chosen). Moreover, highly unstable societies are likely to mean that individuals lack the capacity to engage in
things that matter to them deeply (culture, religion etc…) because they’re likely to be preoccupied with the causes
of the instability (war, sectarianism etc…). At least a threshold level of social stability, then, is essential if
individuals are to be able to meaningfully develop, revise, and pursue a conception of the good.
Economic Stability
Economic stability matters to quality of life because most measures to improve individuals’ welfare depend in
some way upon economic factors. It would be entirely impossible to survey all the relevant arguments here, but
one key idea relates stability and investment. Firms (whether domestic or international) are rational,
self-interested actors and are only likely to invest where it is reasonably likely to be profitable for them to do so.
An unstable economic environment is likely, therefore, to be a deterrent to firms investing. That then lowers the
overall level of economic activity and development in the economy in question. This has a few consequences.
Firstly and most obviously less economic activity means that there is less overall competition in the marketplace.
Other things being equal, that tends to keep prices higher which in turn impacts upon the extent to which
individuals can access material goods. Secondly, less activity means that less people are likely to be in work.
That then means that living standards will be lower overall (as people will be poorer). High unemployment is also
related to a wide range of other social ills like alcoholism and crime (especially domestic violence). Thirdly, less
economic activity means that governments are collecting less taxation. This in turn impacts negatively upon their
capacity to deliver services to improve their populations’ wellbeing.
It’s also worth noting that stable economic environments that attract foreign investment can also have a broader
impact in developing nations. It’s now relatively common for foreigners, where they are seeking to operate in a
developing nation, to build the infrastructure necessary for them to do so. That infrastructure, however, is often
multi-purpose and can help attract other forms of investment. In 2006 The Economist reported that China had
promised to build $4 billion worth of infrastructure for Nigeria in return for the right to extract natural resources.
Finally, economic stability is often related to social and foreign stability. To offer a simple example, a society of
high employment is likely to experience a lower crime rate which, in turn, is likely to create a more stable society.
A stable economic environment that attracts FDI from neighbouring countries is also likely to lead to greater
foreign stability because networks of FDI create an interdependency between nations. Conflicts between them
interrupt their trade flows and so are less likely to be in their interests. The result ought to be less conflict.
Foreign Stability
Stability in foreign relations has an impact upon social and economic stability in a derivative way as noted above.
At a more basic level, a state with unstable relations with its neighbours is also likely to be in a situation where
violence is either frequent, or threatening.
How Does Stability Come About
The first thing to note here is that this is likely to be the main subject matter of debates that raise questions of
stability. Should we open all borders, tax remittances, force corporations to pay tax to the governments of the
nation whose resources they’re extracting, make it illegal to bribe officials in developing nations, recognise a
legally enforceable right to a minimum standard of living etc… All these are measures that would have an impact
upon stability in one way or another.
It is at this point, then, that arguments about stability become more specific and more consequentialist. Would a
legally enforceable minimum standard of living to be provided for by wealthy nations improve everyone’s
wellbeing and so improve social stability, or damage the legitimacy of governments in developing nations and so
lead, long-term, to a collapse in stability Either way, analysis here is usually likely to be specific to the topic in
question and so difficult to cover here.
One thing that’s worth considering, however, is that overlaying all of this is a concern for political stability. It
seems plain that social, economic, and foreign stability would is nearly impossible to bring about if the political
situation is not sufficiently stable. This is because governments regulate social, economic and foreign matters.
At the relatively benign end of the scale, governments that frequently change policy are likely to deter foreign
investors to a degree because the regulatory environment in which they will have to operate will be constantly
shifting. This is potentially expensive and difficult to deal with. In most instances, however, problems of rapidly
shifting policy will be transitory and not likely to be major points of contention in debates. More serious, however,
is systemic political instability (that is, instability that arises as a necessary consequence of the institutional
structure of the community in question). There’s a few argumentative approaches available here. One
straightforward argument suggests that an unstable government will be unable to do very much for their
populations, precisely because its likely to be preoccupied with its own survival. Even if it wasn’t constant shifts in
political power would make long-term projects like infrastructure construction difficult to begin, let along conclude.
Here’s a more philosophical argument from Charles Taylor;
•Individual flourishing depends upon a stable society.
•A stable society in turn depends upon a stable political system. Politics regulates almost every aspect of life. If
the political system isn’t stable, the objects of its rule can hardly be expected to be either.
•A stable political system is only possible where the individuals governed by that political system view its
authority as legitimate; only under such conditions will they voluntarily accept the burdens that that government
places upon them. If they don’t see the government itself as legitimate, they won’t voluntarily follow its orders.
Government becomes unstable, together with society.
•Citizens will only see government as legitimate where they perceive that that government is in pursuit of a
supremely important good in which they themselves have a stake.
•The only possible such good is the support of the common good of the community. In accepting the burdens that
government places on them in order to continue to support that common form of life, individuals also serve their
own interests, given that they depend on that community’s strength for their own quality of life.
•A precondition of political legitimacy (and so of social stability) is the state’s defence of the common good of the
community.
For Taylor, then, political stability depends upon governments pursuing community goods. But what if the
structure of the political system makes that impossible or extremely difficult Many African and Asian states, for
instance, are the product of colonialism and as such contain a number of ethnic and religious groups. Nigeria, for
instance contains around 250 different ethnic groups. The population is split evenly between Christians and
Muslims. These groups often differ greatly from one another in important ways. It may not be possible for
governments of those states to appeal to any kind of a community good, because the communities within those
states differ so greatly from each other. To what common good could they appeal Arguments of this type are
often taken to be arguments in favour of nation-states (states that largely consist of a single nationality) as a
guarantor of social stability. People in nation states are simply more likely to be disposed to accept the legitimacy
of their government than citizens of non nation-states. This might also be taken as a good argument in any
debate that raises the question of secession.
However, even if we don’t accept Taylor’s argument about the pursuit of the common good of the community
being the necessary precondition for political legitimacy, we can at least accept the importance of individuals
perceiving their government as legitimate for a wide range of reasons. We also can accept that people need
reasons (especially in developing states, largely because they’re often quite new states) to accept governments
as legitimate. Whether its necessary to have explicit community solidarity, or a thinner conception of national
unity, or indeed a simple alignment of interests in accepting the rule of a government is an open question.
It is easier, however, to cover the problems states are likely to experience where they aren’t regarded as
legitimate. Here are a just a couple of harms.
For states actually govern themselves, the government needs to be able to pass laws with the confidence that
they’ll be obeyed. States can’t enforce every law they create all the time – individuals have to voluntarily consent
to do so. This is particularly true in developing nations where the capacity to enforce the law is often very limited.
There are often factors at work in these nations that tell against the likelihood of governments being recognised
as legitimate. For instance, many of these states were forcibly created. Most African and Asian states did not
come about as the result of a collective decision on the part of those who’re now grouped together. Rather, the
states were drawn up by colonial powers, and the legitimacy of the governments and borders of those states is
often simply not recognised by many who live within those states. In Pakistan, for instance, tribal law continues to
be enforced in many parts of the nation, despite the presence of more Western-style courts. Many people simply
take their tribes to be more legitimate arbiters than the state.
Many of these states are also corrupt, repressive and violent. Politics might be controlled by a select group of
people rather than being genuinely democratic. This suggests a second reason for regarding the perception of
governmental legitimacy as important. For politics to be truly representative, individuals have to perceive it as a
worthwhile enterprise, otherwise they’re not likely to participate. A political system with the vices just outlined is
unlikely to be perceived that way, and so political discourse and institutions to hold political leaders to account are
unlikely to emerge. That’s obviously bad over the long-term, because it precludes any reform of the system to
make it any better (which, in turn, is itself likely to make people in those nations dependent upon more unstable
sources for their necessities, like foreign aid – bad because foreign aid is subject to the whims of donor nations
and is often used as a bargaining chip by powerful states in their relations with those nations), and because it
also makes more likely the prospect of resistance to those governments as individuals, rather than seeking to
mediate their differences through a set of institutions regarded as legitimate, bypass those institutions and opt for
more direct conflict (for just one example, think secessionist movements in places like Chechnya]).
Finally – democracy and stability. Here’s a good ol’ stock argument about why democracy is likely to be the most
stable form of government available.
•Individuals must perceive their government to be legitimate to voluntarily consent to submit to its rule.
•Their doing so is a necessary precondition of political stability.
•One condition of that government’s perceived legitimacy will be that the policies it pursues broadly harmonise
with the interests and values of the population it governs.
•Democracy is the best available system of government in this regard, because those who hold positions of
power are elected. They have an interest in staying in power. The only way that they can do so is to be
re-elected. Their likelihood of re-election, however, is contingent upon them persuading the electorate that, of all
available candidates, they represent the best cross-section of their interests and values.
•In this way, democratic government is, effectively, a competition amongst different political actors to see which is
able to best represent the interests and values of their electorate.
•This incentive structure is unique to democracy (e.g. in dictatorships, the interest is still in staying in power, but
rule is sustained by force, not by seeking votes).
•Since perceived political legitimacy is a precondition of stability, and a precondition of perceived legitimacy is a
government that represents a population’s interests and values, and since democracy is that system of
government which makes that most likely, democracy ought to be the most system of government possible
insofar as stability depends upon the aforementioned factors.
Stability is an extremely complex issue, but its also one which is likely to be central to most debates about
developing nations.