Net balance debates: What and why?

Author: Intelligence_06

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Intelligence_06
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I have prepared for a verbal PF debate tournament, for the first ever time. Honestly, they have this kind of topics all the time. On balance, the benefit>harms for X, bla bla bla. Bearing the creed of that "If people vote against you, it is because your argument is not strong enough", I started looking for bombs for this kind of topics. Being a DART user inexperienced in PF debating(in which you have to actually speak to win), I forgot to take account in for execution, which my stuttering made me lose the first tournament and got me eliminated.

My main frame of arguments is as follows(Most topics in this format applies).
1. It is true that humans can evaluate benefits and costs.
2. When something is done, the sum of benefits is larger than the sum of costs, vice versa(this is a basic economic principle).
3. Opportunity costs exist and is the benefit being given up if one chooses to instead do an alternative act than the act that gives said benefit.
4. Thus, taking account in all costs and benefits, because only the optimal choice of action results in that when accounting for the opportunity cost, the total net benefit is the most positive, humans will choose to act upon what they consider to be the optimal action every time they do ()anything.

5PRO. X has been done
6PRO. Because when humans do it, they mean it, thus the benefit must outweigh the cost for X's existence.

5CON. Less than 3.5B people do X ever
6CON. Because the average individual does not do X, thus the benefit for X is less than the costs for the average person, or "On balanace".
In other words, "on balance" debates have essentially reduced itself to an argument about the domain of where the debate topic should apply, and sadly I have yet to find a solution to counter those two head to head each other. Luckily, no opponent has tried to even consider anything close to this in PF debating.

So...change my mind, and maybe find flaws to this argument if you really want to.

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@Intelligence_06
I'm unsure what PF stands for, but I am pretty experienced when it comes to IRL debate tournaments.

The flaw in your argument (I apologize if I'm missing anything) seems to be that you're assuming all humans are completely rational actors with perfect knowledge and complete information.

Moreover, the benefits and deficits of most resolutions can't be boiled down to "if the quantity of people who engage in it is greater than those who abstain from it, the resolution is more beneficial than not and therefore the on-balance nature of the resolution is satisfied".

Stakeholders are a very important element. If you can point to more groups the resolution helps than your opponent can point to people the resolution harms (assuming the benefits and deficits are of equal magnitude), then if the resolution boils down to if the benefits outweigh the deficits, you've won, but that doesn't necessarily always involve if one camp has more people than the other.

On the resolution of "fossil fuels production should cease immediately" (just something random, not an actual resolution I've debated), the number of people directly involved in the production of fossil fuels is a fraction of the population. It therefore then can't be said that because 99% of the world doesn't produce fossil fuels that the resolution should fall.

If you can prove that the aggregate benefits/harms outweigh the contrary, you've won not because the resolution is about a fight over the number of people who stand to gain or stand to lose, but because the relative goodness/badness of choices are weighed on which choice is better (and better is defined by leading to the best possible life for as many people as possible). Your argument then becomes not one of debating, but of the nature of making any choice at all.
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The flaw in your argument (I apologize if I'm missing anything) seems to be that you're assuming all humans are completely rational actors with perfect knowledge and complete information. 
I argue that humans are perfectly rational beings, well, at least in the sense that all their actions are based on aggregate benefits and costs truthfully. No one acts if it brings more harms than benefits.

I believe it is just the illusion of “irrationality” because some of their benefit or cost vectors are not easily quantifiable. I don’t have durians for breakfast, nor do I watch Cardi B music videos, for the sole reason I don’t like it. How much one hates one thing or likes another is not easily quantifiable, but can be asserted to exist because decisions are made partially due to them.

On the resolution of "fossil fuels production should cease immediately"
In that case I would argue Con on the fact that no one has ceased fossil fuel productions ever since the industrialization of it, and that fossil fuels are still being used with existing demand, so using the present tense or even short-term future for this topic would be false.