The Bad Faith of Impact Calculus: Value to Life versus Existence debates

Claire McKinney



“To sound off with a cheerful ‘give me liberty or give me death’ sort of argument in the face of the unprecedented and inconceivable potential of destruction of nuclear warfare is not even hollow; it is downright ridiculous…which of course is not to say the reverse…As a matter of fact, to the extent that the discussion of the war question today is conducted in these terms, it is easy to detect a mental reservation on both sides. Those who say ‘better dead than red’ actually think: The losses may not be as great as some anticipate, our civilization will survive; while those who say ‘better red than dead’ actually think: Slavery will not be so bad, man will not change his nature, freedom will not vanish from the earth forever. In other words, the bad faith of the discussants lies in that both dodge the preposterous alternative they themselves have proposed; they are not serious.”
--Hannah Arendt, On Revolution pp3-4, 1963

In the high school kritik debates I have recently judged, it seems that kritikal debaters have shied away from what can be grouped under “value to life” claims in favor of large security impacts and extinction. There is, of course, a fundamental tension in this form of impact calculus in kritik debate because so many of these authors are, at their base, criticizing the survivalist impulse that has driven us to the valuation of securing ourselves from violent death over any other concerns, such as human flourishing, justice, or equality. While it is mere cant to suggest that debate distorts the authors it relies on, there is a strategic flaw with ceding the ground to evaluating the debate through the lens of body-counts alone: as soon as the debate becomes about lives saved, several arguments easily tip in the favor of the policy-oriented: proximate versus root cause (or justifying logic), aff solvency versus alternative solvency, and the deployment of add-ons that do not link to the kritik. In this post, I will argue for the revitalization of debates around question of what human life is for and how to eliminate the “bad faith” of traditional value to life versus extinction debates.

What is value to life?

This is an especially difficult question for most debaters to answer. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. First, most debaters I know have grown up in the United States, and thus share an assumption of many in the West as developed by John Stuart Mill and the liberal theorists who followed in his footsteps. Namely, that there is not one social good that all ought to aspire to. Rather, society ought not interfere with the pursuit of whatever goods the individual wants to pursue so long as that pursuit does not harm another individual (this is the Harm Principle as articulated in On Liberty). This tremendous innovation of being agnostic regarding what people ought to pursue has fundamentally structured liberal democracies like the United States for decades, and thus as members of such a polity, it is often difficult to answer questions regarding what the value of life actually is. Since each individual, in theory, develops that value for herself, to answer the broader question, we would have to fight against unquestioned assumptions of what it means to be a part of this society.
Second, as debaters, we are trained from the earliest moments that every decision is one of mass life or mass death. The drive to every impact to become an extinction-level impact betrays that more than anything else, we believe life to be the ultimate and often, the only good. Because arguments like ‘you have to be alive to value life’ are so intuitive in this framework, it becomes difficult to convince debaters, even those critically oriented, that there is another way to frame these questions.
Of course, none of the critiques being run today are Mill inspired. His belief in democracy, the state, liberalism, and his development of a theory of utilitarianism make him pretty useless for kritik debaters except as an object of criticism. Therefore, critical debaters need to shed their liberalist backgrounds and fully embrace their adopted critical roots.
When we speak of ‘value to life,’ we are not really speaking about some intrinsic value to being human (that would too easily fall into the need to secure life qua life). Depending on what sort of criticism you are running, there are several different answers to the question of what ‘value to life’ might mean. For example, Nietzsche’s normative orientation was towards human flourishing; critique was about discovering whether some set of values is “a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life” or “betray the fullness, the power, the will of life, it courage, its confidence, its future.” (On the Genealogy of Morality, 3). That is, there was a greatness possible in being human that could be denied and destroyed or celebrated and fostered. For authors that follow in this tradition, the problem with some orientations to the world is that they make being alive into a state that one could do with or without.
In some respects, the phrase ‘value to life’ is a misnomer. It is not a question of whether or not life has value, but rather a question of what we ought to see as the point of human existence and what the consequences of either retaining that vision or replacing it with another are. If the purpose of life is just to propagate the species, then of course security, reproduction, and bare life matter. Of course, then eliminating threats to the health of the species, often enslaving certain portions of the population, and denying the ability for anyone to truly risk their life for some higher purpose all seem like normatively neutral or positive policies. If the purpose of life is to encourage human freedom, then these policies become untenable. Debaters need to make clear what their principle (what is life for?) is and generate link arguments against the principles from which their opponents are arguing.

The Debate

There are several elements to the value to life versus extinction debate. This section will describe some of the most obvious parts of the debate and some ways to fight for value to life considerations in a debate round.

Life is a prerequisite to Value to Life

The argument: There is no way to have a value to life if we are all dead. Human existence is a prerequisite to human flourishing or human freedom or whatever else is the value the kritik isolates, and since we have extinction-level impacts, that means it is try or die for us.

I will say that this is perhaps the argument most often deployed and most often successful for eliminating consideration of value to life. The popularization of this argument is, I would argue, partly responsible for the relegation of value to life to a sort of tie-breaker for impact calculus. While its logic seems pretty irrefutable, this argument epitomizes the “bad faith” discussed in the opening quote.

The responses: This argument relies on two things which are probably not really true: first, the aff is actually winning as extinction level impact and second, losing the value the negative has isolated isn’t all that bad. Relating to the first, because no team will win absolute probability of their extinction claims (intervening actors, solvency defense, timeframe considerations, and whatever defense you’ve generated against the link and impact) all mean that it probably is not extinction that will actually occur. Life will go on, even if the catastrophes the affirmative describes do occur. Second, all good kritik debaters should be using their kritik to call into question the knowledge claims of the 1AC. Your authors are operating from the position that what security experts or think tank analysts believe is true is actually the result of a certain way of seeing the world and thus has diminished veracity. Third, you should also be winning a turns case sort of argument (for instance, a self-fulfilling prophecy claim, or a claim about how the tyranny of cause and effect logic ends to totalitarianism because it denies the ability for humans to act differently), which means that the affirmative brings about the loss of life that dooms the value to life. These are all standard arguments one will see in most debates.

Regarding the second, that eliminating value to life isn’t all that bad, is an assumption rarely pointed out or argued against in debate. Because value to life claims are kept so generic, it often is difficult for kritik debaters to argue why it is more important that risking extinction. Consider the situations where the deprivation of human flourishing has been most severe: the concentration camp, refugee camps, chattel slavery, maquiladoras (sweat shops), Guantanamo Bay, the situation of the homeless in America, mental institutions, the prison, etc. Imagine being in a situation where arbitrary force can be used against you physically, sexually, and psychologically. Where your well-being is only a concern insofar as your death may make the administrators look bad, but anything short of death is considered acceptable or below notice. Where your relationships with others can be denied if they are deemed unacceptable or risky and thus you are deprived of the most enriching elements of life (being with others). Yes, it’s true most people in these situations do not commit suicide (the other favorite argument as to why life is more important than value to life); but the most admirable are the ones who put their bodies on the line in order to effectuate change (think hunger protests, mass suicide attempts like in Guantanamo, attempts to escape, etc; people may not commit suicide, but they risk almost certain death to change their situation). Also, the argument about suicide ignores a couple of fundamental truths. First, these populations are often actively denied the means to take their own life. Second, it is speaking from a position of extreme callousness and privilege to make the ‘better red than dead’ argument. Isn’t there a third option that we ought to normatively dedicate ourselves to? If not, then the value judgments such as being free is better than being a slave lose all meaning. To argue that it is ok to subjugate large swaths of the population as long as existence is secured is ethically suspect, but more importantly, the debater ought to implore the judge to make their judgments from a position of such subjugation. The fact that we cannot imagine what it would be like in chattel slavery, the concentration camp, or working 18 hours in a sweat shops is a pretty good indication that such life is no life at all.


Positing a value to life destroys value to life

The Argument: Once you ascribe a value to life, you can isolate those whoa re missing that value and then eliminate them, making the kritik genocidal.

This argument hopefully is obviously fallacious given the above discussion. This is more of a reason to abandon the language of ‘value to life’ in favor of the specific thing you value (freedom, human flourishing, etc) than it is a good argument.

The response: The kritik does not posit a human essence or a particular end that all most aspire to. Rather, it is arguing for a recognition that it is the ability to deprive people of [freedom, human flourishing] is implicated the in the ability to kill them for the greater good or to let them die in neglect or to actively destroy their lives because to furthers something greater than themselves. We can argue that the essence of being human is in plurality, that each of us is different and unique, and therefore, freedom and human flourishing requires that we encourage that difference and diversity rather than destroy it.

Value to Life is circular

The Argument: Value to life is only important because when one is denied the value to life, then they can be killed. Which means value to life only matters because life itself is important. Which means life is still the highest value, so vote aff because we save the most lives.

This is almost the reverse of the first argument about life being a prerequisite, but it is persuasive because of the mistake most kritik debaters make of only discussing the body count aspects of the kritik.

The response: This one is easiest to respond to if you just avoid linking to it in the first place. The impact to value to life should not be death (the Dillon 99 evidence often used to make the value to life claim is impacted by the Holocaust, not death; maintaining that distinction is important. Genocide, the ghettos, death camps, and targeted racism is much more meaningful than death because of the system of valuation that then can be translated to all human life). Yes, you are making a turns the case argument as well, insofar as denying value to life often results in mass death, but that is not the primary reason why value to life matters; it is an ancillary concern.

What this does mean is that you have to win why the value you isolate matters. This requires hard thinking on the part of the debater. Body counts are the easy valuation system, but the purpose of critique is to move us from those standard forms of judgment and logic. Putting more thought into your critique, cutting cards by those who think freedom, human flourishing, justice, equality, etc. matter in and of themselves will place you in a position to move out of the deadlock critiques are currently in.