Well, I think the US should probably admit 3x the number of immigrants it currently does, so I’m not sure our positions are different enough to justify a proper debate!
I’m really sorry, but my fever just acted up again, and it’s unlikely I‘ll be able to vote on this one. Looks like you already have three excellent votes, and I’ll make it up at the final.
I accept that Pro must prove that the harms of social media outweigh the benefits to win.
This doesn’t mean Pro has to outline every single benefit social media could possibly have, and then explain why the costs outweigh the benefits. It’s sufficient for Pro to outline harms, and argue these harms are so large, no benefit could outweigh them -- at that point, it’s Con’s job to bring up benefits that could potentially outweigh these harms, or to mitigate the scope of Pro’s harms. While it would certainly be good debating to do the cost–benefit analysis in Pro’s case, it is possible for Pro to win that the harms outweigh the benefits without an explicit cost–benefit analysis.
Pro’s case:
Pro has two primary claims.
First, they argue that social media leads to misinformation, as anyone can post any opinion, regardless of verification, on social media.
I’m not sure I credit this much, as, as Con points out, Pro doesn’t have strong evidence for this claim -- just because people can post their opinions on social media doesn’t necessitate that it causes so much misinformation, it causes such substantial effects on global or American politics. However, I accept that Pro has a source suggesting social media biases people’s views somewhat, and reduces their trust in institutional news sources, giving them some offense.
Second, they argue that when social media rises as a source of news, people use it and trust it more, thus amplifying its effects on mental health. They offer some sources -- without really explaining the content in them -- suggesting that social media has worsened mental health in teens, although the link to it rising as a source of news isn’t made clearly enough.
Con’s primary objection is that even if these costs exist, it’s not clear they outweigh the benefit, and Pro’s job is to engage in a cost–benefit analysis. While I accept that Pro doesn’t clearly weigh this against potential benefits, Con names no potential benefit. So I’m left concluding that there have been some harms named in this debate, and no potential benefits named in this debate, so the harms, pretty plausibly, outweigh the benefits.
Con’s case:
In R1, Con argues that people are able to evaluate benefits and costs themselves pretty well, and since social media is rising as a news source, that suggests people have a revealed preference in favor of this.
In R2, Pro contests that people are able to evaluate costs and benefits themselves, saying, “Just because something is rising as a news source doesn’t make it beneficial.”
Con has two warrants for the claim that people can evaluate things like social media themselves.
First, in R2, Con argues that this is a “fundamental rule in economics and decisionmaking.” This isn’t a sufficient explanation, as Con neither has a source nor any argument for why this is a fundamental rule. Indeed, it seems to me -- as Pro points out implicitly, in R2 -- that people make bad decisions all the time, or decisions that don’t consider harms to third parties, like non-users. Note that this is not me engaging in judge intervention: tabula rasa judging requires discrediting arguments that are insufficiently explained.
Second, Con cites a forum post they themselves made. Obviously, this isn’t a credible source that serves as an independent warrant, and the quotation they bring up simply asserts that people are good at comparing costs and benefits, without offering any explanation or justification that this is true, or a universal principle that applies in the case of social media.
There’s a bit of semantics about what it means for a benefit to go to “individuals,” but I accept Con’s point that groups are groups of many different individuals, so I don’t think that specific response from Pro works. That said, I’m not sure Con gets much offense from the argument they’re making here.
Conclusion:
I don’t think either of Pro’s impacts is well-explained, but at least they exist -- it seems clear that there’s some risk of people getting false information and acting on it from social media when anyone can post their opinions on it, and some risk of reliance on social media that accentuates its problems with teen mental health. Pro has some sources for these claims. In contrast, Con has no evidence for the claim that people are good at evaluating costs and benefits of the media they use, nor that -- even if people are good at making decisions for themselves -- this doesn’t lead to greater costs for third parties (as misinformation might). Hence, I’m forced to vote Pro.
I agree with you about the causal relationship! All I was saying is the argument needed to be proven in the debate, rather than criticizing its truth out of round (for example, citing a study that controlled for income differences directly, or used a quasi-experimental approach). Trivially I wasn’t making the reverse causality claim in the RFD, just the omitted variables one.
I’d say the big thing to fix -- especially when relying on two nonconsequentialist arguments, one on distributive justice and the other on bodily autonomy -- is to really beef up the reasons why the judge should care about those impacts. You don’t actually have a clear argument for why distributive justice matters, nor why governments ought ban people from making choices that aren’t informed.
And since you relied on largely defensive arguments to mitigate Pro’s case on the availability of organs -- such as the efficacy of your counterplan in meeting some fraction of that shortage, and some attacks on Pro’s evidence -- you needed those impacts to work.
The other piece of feedback I’ll mention is that I think you’ve got to explicitly weigh more. Because your rebuttal to Pro on organs was largely lots of evidence mitigating the argument, but no real turn -- so even at the end of the debate, I’m left with Pro potentially having a small impact on organs, and you having impacts related to organ donors not making an informed choice and distributive justice, and I’ve got no clue how to weigh the two. I kind of defaulted to weighing on probability, but having some magnitude-level weighing would’ve been great.
Finally, I think you’ve got to make your criticisms of Pro’s plan specific to his plan, rather than about how these models have worked in other countries. Pro is pretty clear that he plans to compensate donors as much as you do, and then some (and you agree with this). So a lot of those numbers on how people aren’t making an informed choice because they regret it later, when they realize the economic impact on their lives, don’t work as well, because Pro is -- by perming your CP -- compensating them for lost productivity. This also significantly reduces the offense of your autonomy point: because I’m not clear why the solution to one violation of autonomy (people not making an informed choice) is another violation (the state taking away people’s choice). This would make sense if most people, with information, would choose not to do this -- then, it makes sense why the state’s intervention is to take away the choice entirely -- but with Pro’s perm in place, your evidence doesn’t actually prove that. So I’m left voting on distributive justice, pretty much.
Appreciate the vote a lot, thanks so much! I’d really love any specific feedback you’d have for me, if you ever have the time.
As for the CP, that was mostly just in there to articulate my own IRL position, not to win the debate or make any real difference in terms of the outcome -- I took this debate as a challenge to try and see if I could clearly explain why I’m very pro-immigration, even pro 2x or 3x the immigration the US currently has, while still opposing abolishing any visa cap at all (or, more extremely though this wasn’t really christianm’s advocacy toward the end, open borders).
The claim that “I don’t have the burden of proof” is different than the claim that “atheism is the lack of belief in God, not the disbelief in God.”
I strongly reject the existence of invisible garden fairies because their existence has not been proven. So the claim that theists have the burden of proof is *consistent* with atheism being the active rejection of God’s existence.
Random thought (as an atheist) – it seems to me that distinguishing between a “lack of belief in God” and “active disbelief in God” is a semantic trick to avoid talking about probabilities. Atheists who make this distinction often ask “Do you actively reject the existence of a pink unicorn, or do you simply lack belief in it?”, as if that proves their point – but I do, in fact, actively reject the existence of a pink unicorn. Maybe atheists simply say this to say that religious people have the burden of proof – but that’s a claim independent of “disbelief” and “lack of belief” (i.e., you can actively reject God’s existence on account of it being unproven).
So I’m curious, Pro – would you say that someone who places a 50% probability in God existing is an atheist? Because that’s the only relevant question – if someone thinks there’s a 49.9% chance God exists, then they actively reject God’s existence (in all likelihood), right?
In terms of your observation, I agree that the topic doesn’t bind you to a specific advocacy or particular gun control policy. But it doesn’t stop you from having one if you want to. Some regulations, like universal background checks or training requirements, are fairly easy to defend. But even if you don’t want to have a strict or specific proposal, you can still use examples of gun control policies for which Pro’s arguments didn’t apply. Those would help prove your responses on Pro’s arguments being sometimes untrue of many gun control policies, but without requiring you to make arguments centered around exclusively them.
I think the topic is a bit vaguely worded. I’m not sure if “just” means “justified” or “obligatory,” and I’m not sure if Pro has to defend it in most circumstances or it’s sufficient for them to defend violent revolution in some circumstances.
“Economic decline caused by corruption triggers uncertainty and national security concerns – foreign rivals are emboldened to challenge American instability and vulnerabilities trigger loose nukes...”
Yeah – and also, we encounter infinite series that converge on 1 in the real world all the time! It’s not like something we’ve never heard of.
You take a circle and divide its circumference by its diameter – there you have it, an infinite decimal.
You invest some money in an economy if inflation is fixed in the short run (e.g., a really really sticky economy) – and the spending exists in an infinite cycle. That’s 1 + C'(Y) + [C'(Y)]^2 + [C'(Y)]^3 ... and since C'(Y) belongs to (0,1), that’s identical to 1/(1-C'(Y)) (C'(Y) is the derivative of consumption with respect to real GDP).
Sorry, I’m not very well-versed in pure mathematics, but here’s my intuitive reaction to your argument (I may be wrong).
While the number 0.999... is clearly a number in the interval [0,1], the number ....999.0 seems to equal infinity if it extends indefinitely in the leftward direction. So your proof seems to rely on adding and subtracting infinities. I may be wrong here, though.
Would you be willing to debate this sometime in January? I’m only free then, but I’d be interested in taking the Con side in this. I prefer doing live debates (i.e., via a recorded audio call), but either works.
At the very least, I’m interested in discussing this with you, because I think there’s real benefits from having a “gender” option irrespective of the fact that gender is “scientifically imprecise.” For example, “political ideology” is also imprecise and a social construction—it is nonetheless an option, because it contributes valuable information. Gender might be even more important information for the mental health of DART members who are, for example, trans, or have gender dysphoria (and the scientific consensus, by the way, is that trans people—whose gender, whether that’s neurological or socially constructed, differs from the sex they were assigned at birth—exist), to ensure that other members refer to them by the appropriate pronouns, for example.
I’d be more interested, though, in a debate that compares our two specific standards. So, rather than us debating two different topics -- you affirming that the standard should be at conception and me defending that it should be exactly 24 weeks -- it would be you saying that 24 weeks is worse than conception and me saying conception is worse than 24 weeks.
But I guess it wouldn’t be that different either way. My issue is it’s hard for me to defend 24 over, say, 25, because really my standard is just “when the fetus begins to feel pain and be sentient” and the research still doesn’t know the exact number. So approximately 24 would be my standard.
"Isn't it essentially the same BoP if you were to affirm why personhood should be granted at 24 weeks and justify why that time is more suitable than ¬24 weeks?"
I agree that this is my BoP -- to prove that my standard is better than yours. But I disagree that I need to prove my standard objectively. My burden isn’t to show that 24 weeks is the exact correct standard, simply that it’s a better standard than yours. And if I prove that your standard has harms that my standard doesn’t, my burden is met. So maybe change the line to “Con’s BoP is to show that their standard is better than the standard of conception.”
And the debate might end up requiring me to justify personhood after conception, but clearly both of us agree that -- after conception -- we should attribute personhood, and the only question in the debate is whether, at the points between conception and approximately 24 weeks, we should attribute personhood -- my BOP would be to say that we should not.
I also disagree that my burden of proof is necessarily that “Personhood *should* be attributed at a time other than conception (e.g birth).” I think my actual burden of proof would be to show that attributing personhood at conception is a bad thing and would do active harm.
I’d be down to debate this, but I dislike the format -- it’s so weird, there’d be blank spaces on the flow at random speeches.
I’d prefer R1–R4 standard format, with no new offense and no new defensive arguments in response to R1/R2 arguments in R4. So, for example:
Pro presents their contentions in R1 -> Con rebuts Pro’s case and presents Con’s contentions in R1 (though Con could integrate the two insofar as they had some offense, assuming a shared BoP) -> Pro rebuts Con’s R1 arguments, and so on (when I say “arguments,” I include rebuttal).
>But I do take your point re: having a normative theory. I considered that option, and in hindsight it might have been a better choice.
I don’t necessarily mean you should’ve done that in your R1 case. I just mean, in your response, you should’ve perhaps advanced some combination of ethical theories. But really, you didn’t need to, you could’ve built on the intuition line, which I think is fairly strong if you go a bit further. You know more about ethics than I do, so I’m confident you’d have come up with something that would have won even if kritiks were allowed -- I’m just saying that it seems like you had the space, so it could be useful to bolster your responses more.
Congratulations blamonkey!
Hi guys! Unfortunately, I’ve fallen sick, and was unable to complete my RFD in time.
I’ll be sure to post my RFD by tonight even though I can’t vote, but the tournament results will be based on cast votes.
I’ll be done with my RFD in about ~10 hours! Started on it yesterday.
Will vote on this in the next couple of days!
Well, I think the US should probably admit 3x the number of immigrants it currently does, so I’m not sure our positions are different enough to justify a proper debate!
I’m really sorry, but my fever just acted up again, and it’s unlikely I‘ll be able to vote on this one. Looks like you already have three excellent votes, and I’ll make it up at the final.
I’m sorry for the delay! I actually did fall unwell last week, but I will do my best to vote on this in the next 7 hours.
Will be voting on this on Tuesday!
Thanks! Glad you found it helpful, and I hope you found the topic interesting :)
Yep, I’ll vote on this once the Voting Period opens!
RFD (Pt. 1):
Burdens:
I accept that Pro must prove that the harms of social media outweigh the benefits to win.
This doesn’t mean Pro has to outline every single benefit social media could possibly have, and then explain why the costs outweigh the benefits. It’s sufficient for Pro to outline harms, and argue these harms are so large, no benefit could outweigh them -- at that point, it’s Con’s job to bring up benefits that could potentially outweigh these harms, or to mitigate the scope of Pro’s harms. While it would certainly be good debating to do the cost–benefit analysis in Pro’s case, it is possible for Pro to win that the harms outweigh the benefits without an explicit cost–benefit analysis.
Pro’s case:
Pro has two primary claims.
First, they argue that social media leads to misinformation, as anyone can post any opinion, regardless of verification, on social media.
I’m not sure I credit this much, as, as Con points out, Pro doesn’t have strong evidence for this claim -- just because people can post their opinions on social media doesn’t necessitate that it causes so much misinformation, it causes such substantial effects on global or American politics. However, I accept that Pro has a source suggesting social media biases people’s views somewhat, and reduces their trust in institutional news sources, giving them some offense.
(Pt. 2)
Second, they argue that when social media rises as a source of news, people use it and trust it more, thus amplifying its effects on mental health. They offer some sources -- without really explaining the content in them -- suggesting that social media has worsened mental health in teens, although the link to it rising as a source of news isn’t made clearly enough.
Con’s primary objection is that even if these costs exist, it’s not clear they outweigh the benefit, and Pro’s job is to engage in a cost–benefit analysis. While I accept that Pro doesn’t clearly weigh this against potential benefits, Con names no potential benefit. So I’m left concluding that there have been some harms named in this debate, and no potential benefits named in this debate, so the harms, pretty plausibly, outweigh the benefits.
Con’s case:
In R1, Con argues that people are able to evaluate benefits and costs themselves pretty well, and since social media is rising as a news source, that suggests people have a revealed preference in favor of this.
In R2, Pro contests that people are able to evaluate costs and benefits themselves, saying, “Just because something is rising as a news source doesn’t make it beneficial.”
Con has two warrants for the claim that people can evaluate things like social media themselves.
First, in R2, Con argues that this is a “fundamental rule in economics and decisionmaking.” This isn’t a sufficient explanation, as Con neither has a source nor any argument for why this is a fundamental rule. Indeed, it seems to me -- as Pro points out implicitly, in R2 -- that people make bad decisions all the time, or decisions that don’t consider harms to third parties, like non-users. Note that this is not me engaging in judge intervention: tabula rasa judging requires discrediting arguments that are insufficiently explained.
(Pt. 3)
Second, Con cites a forum post they themselves made. Obviously, this isn’t a credible source that serves as an independent warrant, and the quotation they bring up simply asserts that people are good at comparing costs and benefits, without offering any explanation or justification that this is true, or a universal principle that applies in the case of social media.
There’s a bit of semantics about what it means for a benefit to go to “individuals,” but I accept Con’s point that groups are groups of many different individuals, so I don’t think that specific response from Pro works. That said, I’m not sure Con gets much offense from the argument they’re making here.
Conclusion:
I don’t think either of Pro’s impacts is well-explained, but at least they exist -- it seems clear that there’s some risk of people getting false information and acting on it from social media when anyone can post their opinions on it, and some risk of reliance on social media that accentuates its problems with teen mental health. Pro has some sources for these claims. In contrast, Con has no evidence for the claim that people are good at evaluating costs and benefits of the media they use, nor that -- even if people are good at making decisions for themselves -- this doesn’t lead to greater costs for third parties (as misinformation might). Hence, I’m forced to vote Pro.
I agree with you about the causal relationship! All I was saying is the argument needed to be proven in the debate, rather than criticizing its truth out of round (for example, citing a study that controlled for income differences directly, or used a quasi-experimental approach). Trivially I wasn’t making the reverse causality claim in the RFD, just the omitted variables one.
Thought you were very good, to be fair!
I’d say the big thing to fix -- especially when relying on two nonconsequentialist arguments, one on distributive justice and the other on bodily autonomy -- is to really beef up the reasons why the judge should care about those impacts. You don’t actually have a clear argument for why distributive justice matters, nor why governments ought ban people from making choices that aren’t informed.
And since you relied on largely defensive arguments to mitigate Pro’s case on the availability of organs -- such as the efficacy of your counterplan in meeting some fraction of that shortage, and some attacks on Pro’s evidence -- you needed those impacts to work.
The other piece of feedback I’ll mention is that I think you’ve got to explicitly weigh more. Because your rebuttal to Pro on organs was largely lots of evidence mitigating the argument, but no real turn -- so even at the end of the debate, I’m left with Pro potentially having a small impact on organs, and you having impacts related to organ donors not making an informed choice and distributive justice, and I’ve got no clue how to weigh the two. I kind of defaulted to weighing on probability, but having some magnitude-level weighing would’ve been great.
Finally, I think you’ve got to make your criticisms of Pro’s plan specific to his plan, rather than about how these models have worked in other countries. Pro is pretty clear that he plans to compensate donors as much as you do, and then some (and you agree with this). So a lot of those numbers on how people aren’t making an informed choice because they regret it later, when they realize the economic impact on their lives, don’t work as well, because Pro is -- by perming your CP -- compensating them for lost productivity. This also significantly reduces the offense of your autonomy point: because I’m not clear why the solution to one violation of autonomy (people not making an informed choice) is another violation (the state taking away people’s choice). This would make sense if most people, with information, would choose not to do this -- then, it makes sense why the state’s intervention is to take away the choice entirely -- but with Pro’s perm in place, your evidence doesn’t actually prove that. So I’m left voting on distributive justice, pretty much.
Appreciate the vote a lot, thanks so much! I’d really love any specific feedback you’d have for me, if you ever have the time.
As for the CP, that was mostly just in there to articulate my own IRL position, not to win the debate or make any real difference in terms of the outcome -- I took this debate as a challenge to try and see if I could clearly explain why I’m very pro-immigration, even pro 2x or 3x the immigration the US currently has, while still opposing abolishing any visa cap at all (or, more extremely though this wasn’t really christianm’s advocacy toward the end, open borders).
I forgot how short 10,000 characters is. I had to spend 25 minutes cutting my round 1 down. Gah.
I’m down to debate this if you change it from a 4-point system to a “choose winner” system.
fuck I’m sorry - I tested positive for Covid and went into quarantine and kinda lost track of the time
The claim that “I don’t have the burden of proof” is different than the claim that “atheism is the lack of belief in God, not the disbelief in God.”
I strongly reject the existence of invisible garden fairies because their existence has not been proven. So the claim that theists have the burden of proof is *consistent* with atheism being the active rejection of God’s existence.
Random thought (as an atheist) – it seems to me that distinguishing between a “lack of belief in God” and “active disbelief in God” is a semantic trick to avoid talking about probabilities. Atheists who make this distinction often ask “Do you actively reject the existence of a pink unicorn, or do you simply lack belief in it?”, as if that proves their point – but I do, in fact, actively reject the existence of a pink unicorn. Maybe atheists simply say this to say that religious people have the burden of proof – but that’s a claim independent of “disbelief” and “lack of belief” (i.e., you can actively reject God’s existence on account of it being unproven).
So I’m curious, Pro – would you say that someone who places a 50% probability in God existing is an atheist? Because that’s the only relevant question – if someone thinks there’s a 49.9% chance God exists, then they actively reject God’s existence (in all likelihood), right?
In terms of your observation, I agree that the topic doesn’t bind you to a specific advocacy or particular gun control policy. But it doesn’t stop you from having one if you want to. Some regulations, like universal background checks or training requirements, are fairly easy to defend. But even if you don’t want to have a strict or specific proposal, you can still use examples of gun control policies for which Pro’s arguments didn’t apply. Those would help prove your responses on Pro’s arguments being sometimes untrue of many gun control policies, but without requiring you to make arguments centered around exclusively them.
I think the topic is a bit vaguely worded. I’m not sure if “just” means “justified” or “obligatory,” and I’m not sure if Pro has to defend it in most circumstances or it’s sufficient for them to defend violent revolution in some circumstances.
I'll try to judge this soon, it looks interesting.
Disclaimer: I’m a feminist, I just can’t understand a word Judith Butler says and am not a fan of her thanks to the Avital Ronell thing.
My reaction at Zaradi’s third card:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpzVc7s-_e8
“Economic decline caused by corruption triggers uncertainty and national security concerns – foreign rivals are emboldened to challenge American instability and vulnerabilities trigger loose nukes...”
I’ll be honest, I lol’d.
Yeah – and also, we encounter infinite series that converge on 1 in the real world all the time! It’s not like something we’ve never heard of.
You take a circle and divide its circumference by its diameter – there you have it, an infinite decimal.
You invest some money in an economy if inflation is fixed in the short run (e.g., a really really sticky economy) – and the spending exists in an infinite cycle. That’s 1 + C'(Y) + [C'(Y)]^2 + [C'(Y)]^3 ... and since C'(Y) belongs to (0,1), that’s identical to 1/(1-C'(Y)) (C'(Y) is the derivative of consumption with respect to real GDP).
Sorry, I’m not very well-versed in pure mathematics, but here’s my intuitive reaction to your argument (I may be wrong).
While the number 0.999... is clearly a number in the interval [0,1], the number ....999.0 seems to equal infinity if it extends indefinitely in the leftward direction. So your proof seems to rely on adding and subtracting infinities. I may be wrong here, though.
I recommend replacing “is ontologically committed to” with “assumes.” I find that easy-to-understand language is better debate strategy.
Would you be willing to debate this sometime in January? I’m only free then, but I’d be interested in taking the Con side in this. I prefer doing live debates (i.e., via a recorded audio call), but either works.
This was fun, thanks.
At the very least, I’m interested in discussing this with you, because I think there’s real benefits from having a “gender” option irrespective of the fact that gender is “scientifically imprecise.” For example, “political ideology” is also imprecise and a social construction—it is nonetheless an option, because it contributes valuable information. Gender might be even more important information for the mental health of DART members who are, for example, trans, or have gender dysphoria (and the scientific consensus, by the way, is that trans people—whose gender, whether that’s neurological or socially constructed, differs from the sex they were assigned at birth—exist), to ensure that other members refer to them by the appropriate pronouns, for example.
Thanks for the vote and extensive RFD! Much appreciated <3
https://www.debate.org/debates/Ban-Animal-Testing/2/
https://www.debate.org/debates/Minimum-Wage-15-an-hour-or-none/1/
https://www.debate.org/debates/Bowe-Bergdahl-should-be-convicted-and-punished-for-desertion-or-misbehavior-before-the-enemy/1/
https://www.debate.org/debates/LIVE-DEBATE-Right-to-Housing/1/
https://www.debate.org/debates/LIVE-DEBATE-Qualified-Immunity/1/
>They need to put a transcript on the debate
Nah -- there have been many live debates both on this site and on DDO that have been voted on.
I think this is pretty close to what a DDO/DART round would look like if the debaters had 15 minutes of prep and did it live, lol...
It’s sort of like WS without replies, except more on-flow and much less emphasis on public speaking ability.
I’d be more interested, though, in a debate that compares our two specific standards. So, rather than us debating two different topics -- you affirming that the standard should be at conception and me defending that it should be exactly 24 weeks -- it would be you saying that 24 weeks is worse than conception and me saying conception is worse than 24 weeks.
But I guess it wouldn’t be that different either way. My issue is it’s hard for me to defend 24 over, say, 25, because really my standard is just “when the fetus begins to feel pain and be sentient” and the research still doesn’t know the exact number. So approximately 24 would be my standard.
"Isn't it essentially the same BoP if you were to affirm why personhood should be granted at 24 weeks and justify why that time is more suitable than ¬24 weeks?"
I agree that this is my BoP -- to prove that my standard is better than yours. But I disagree that I need to prove my standard objectively. My burden isn’t to show that 24 weeks is the exact correct standard, simply that it’s a better standard than yours. And if I prove that your standard has harms that my standard doesn’t, my burden is met. So maybe change the line to “Con’s BoP is to show that their standard is better than the standard of conception.”
And the debate might end up requiring me to justify personhood after conception, but clearly both of us agree that -- after conception -- we should attribute personhood, and the only question in the debate is whether, at the points between conception and approximately 24 weeks, we should attribute personhood -- my BOP would be to say that we should not.
I also disagree that my burden of proof is necessarily that “Personhood *should* be attributed at a time other than conception (e.g birth).” I think my actual burden of proof would be to show that attributing personhood at conception is a bad thing and would do active harm.
“I would accept that format. What stage of development would you like to affirm?”
Around 24 weeks.
I’d be down to debate this, but I dislike the format -- it’s so weird, there’d be blank spaces on the flow at random speeches.
I’d prefer R1–R4 standard format, with no new offense and no new defensive arguments in response to R1/R2 arguments in R4. So, for example:
Pro presents their contentions in R1 -> Con rebuts Pro’s case and presents Con’s contentions in R1 (though Con could integrate the two insofar as they had some offense, assuming a shared BoP) -> Pro rebuts Con’s R1 arguments, and so on (when I say “arguments,” I include rebuttal).
Just curious, what’s your personal position on this issue?
I think your case is very good, to be clear, and your overviews are very strategic and well done.
Would you be down to debate this? In a live debate, via Google Hangouts.
A debate via an audio call (e.g., on Google Hangouts) rather than a text-based debate.
I’d be happy to do a live debate on this at some point. (From Con.)
I'll try my best to get to it, looks interesting.
Lol what’s with this spate of God debates?
My 14-year-old self would’ve been eager to debate you on this.
>But I do take your point re: having a normative theory. I considered that option, and in hindsight it might have been a better choice.
I don’t necessarily mean you should’ve done that in your R1 case. I just mean, in your response, you should’ve perhaps advanced some combination of ethical theories. But really, you didn’t need to, you could’ve built on the intuition line, which I think is fairly strong if you go a bit further. You know more about ethics than I do, so I’m confident you’d have come up with something that would have won even if kritiks were allowed -- I’m just saying that it seems like you had the space, so it could be useful to bolster your responses more.