Sam Block, in the chair, introduces the round with the motion clarification Shengwu added; “…semicolon; this is a debate about pacifism”. No counter-propping the virtues of feudalism, I guess.
These outround reports will be less detailed than those I wrote for Botswana; consequently I’d advise ascribing to them a lower degree of reliability. We’ll be following Dan Berman and Jordan as the KCL team until they’re out and so I can’t promise bias won’t effect my judgement as to how the round went but I’ll try to consciously limit it’s influence as best I’m able.
Oxford A are first proposition in ‘This House would never fight for King and Country’. Wolgar jokes that Hugh and he are less popular than the other teams which include KCL as underdogs, Warwick B as a fresher team in the break and UCC Law B who are, you know, Irish. Wolgar explains they are going to prop straight ‘you should never fight’ as ‘in any circumstance, if there is the question ‘would you fight here’ we would say ‘no”. He apologises that the moral framework he’ll be using is ‘pluralist’ (all over the shop). Oxford want people to have a purity of motives and claims that any intention that another individual should die is inappropriate as it expresses a judgement made in ignorance that your life should be valued above theirs. He compares this focus on motivation to the distinction between the case of giving money to the poor as the result of taxation and giving charitable donations directly, the latter of which demonstrates purity of motives. He offers precedence in the form of the attitude to life expressed through medical ethics and the concern that in warfare attitudes are adversely affected by government propaganda. They wish individuals to adopt a ‘conservative’ approach to killing and explicitly denies consequentialism regarding death toll is a reasonable standard upon which to judge the debate (though his reasons for saying so are not obvious). Channelling Kant he claims that joining the military involves abrogating your obligation to make moral choices for yourself by following the orders of your commanding officers. This is exacerbated, Ben claims, by the diminution of identity which occurs within military forces. Even in WLD warfare involves deception on the part of governments, name-checking the WMD controversy.
Dan begins speaking. He jokes that Ben was right to call his stance ‘conservative’ given the taxation analogy. Dan says he and Jordan are going to argue that while in fact in the main people do not want to fight and do not want to be responsible for killing, there are clear cases where there is a moral imperative to do so. You have a moral responsibility to your society, especially in WLD, and that a failure to do so results in more killing and more death and consequently makes those things for which Ben etc do not want to be responsible, their responsibility. A refusal to pay taxes is a refusal to engage in society. He brings up Abu Gharib, the link being a need for members of the armed forces who are not motivated by their conviction in the mission. Volunteerism gives self-selection effects which are negative (is this the response to a prop not given against conscription?) in so far as they involve more killing and abuses. Wolgar asks ‘how can one person make a difference’. Dan cites Abu Gharib again where one moral objector might have stopped things. The crowd agrees. Dan explains that conflicts start because one side thinks they can win (as Maddy might say ‘classic Dan’) and cites Zimbabwe (asking Hugh to relive the WUDC Final?) as an example of where non-intervention has caused the situation to decline in a reprehensible way. If we don’t do it, no one else will. He quotes “All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” and calls Prop’s case a call for the silence of good men.
Hugh attempts to ridicule the notion that goodness could be spread through joining the army (the counterargument is unclear; he suggests this is logically fallacious given Wolgar and he are advocating not joining the army), seemingly the idea is that they are not accountable the effects of changing the proportion of strongly moral individuals in the army if they contend that no one should join the army, even if foreseeably not everyone would (not sure if I agree; if he was being straightforwardly Kantian in his approach this would be right, but it’s not clear how well or if this works within their ‘pluralism’). Jokes that Dan assuming consequentialism as the framework of judgement just means he wasn’t at the judges briefing. There is a similarity Hugh wishes to draw between the opp case and being mugged so as to give that money to charity (the audience laughs) in light of the abbrogation of moral agency which happens in a modern army. He claims this is a necessity in all armies given the need for speed and efficiency in military action. He states that Dan’s advocation of the need of the army as a deterrent avoids Ben’s analysis of the lack of adequate information in a state of war (due to propaganda etc). ((Not sure this is correct; prop burden is /never/)). He suggests that Dan’s picture of good practice is the post-Bismarckian balance of power in Europe and claims this leads inevitably to a World War 1 situation. Dan asks whether this pacifism as applied to Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait would encourage further unchecked aggression. Hugh’s response confuses me, he seems to claim this is not for them to advocate and complains that Ben’s arguments were misrepresented as being egoist. Hugh cites the high death toll of warfare throughout history. He claims that Cold War strategic thinking about the domino effect and the consequent need to prevent ideological spread caused widespread unnecessary acts of killing. Pacifists will never be the first person to take a shot. Closing ask how you can influence others from outside the army. Hugh claims that being a conscientious objector itself carries with it influence and the possibility influence might be stronger within the army is trumped by the immorality of killing. States he and Ben cannot prove all war is wrong, but that in the ‘vast majority of cases’ you ought not to fight and in all cases you should assume you ought not to.
Jordan points out that if the Oxford pacifists of the 30s had their way and didn’t become officers in 1939 then we would be here to have a debate. Jordan states that conclusive and fast ends to war clearly limits the amount of killing which occurs. Jordan states Oxford claimed don’t have a moral right to choose for people to deny and that simultaneously it’s legitimate to allow people to die in the name of upholding your ‘moral purity’ and explains that this is egoism in the form of moral fetishism. Jordan cites the Taliban (Al-Qaeda) as an example of people who predicated their strategy on the idea that enough western pacifists would prevent action being taken against them. He argues that the liberal media can manipulate you as much as the jingoist media in so far as they can make you think your selfishness and cowardice are a virtue and can champion the implicit racism of thinking “oh, that’s just how they like things over there”. Suggests that the idea that there is coercion in the army makes moral choice illegitimate is really just generalised anarchism; that any form of coercion makes choice impossible, and suggests philosophical anarchism is a unusually strong position for prop to adopt. Democracies involve more ‘opting in’ to the collective of my community, as well as the championing of human rights. If we accept that human rights are a good standard for us, this means that we must demand they be upheld for others; to think otherwise is to buy into Fox News relativism. Ben asks how many wars have been fought ‘in the name of democracy’ and that this suggests the propaganda effect negates Jordan’s argument. Jordan cites the wisdom of crowds (calling it Jurors Law) as giving a reason for thinking mass decision making is more reliable as a determiner of whether wars are justified. Jordan closes by suggesting that a right to self-defense implies a requirement to participate in collective defense.
Warwick say they are sanguine to the notion that peaceful thinking makes peace more likely. He claims KCL’s argument was that the moral harms of opting out are at least as great as joining an army; but points out that Oxford’s coercion analysis is equally true of the other army and so the killing of those people is more morally dubious. ‘If you storm a city your sense of humanity kicks in’ and you feel unwilling to act barbarically to the citizens if they are acting as pacifists to you. Warwick claims that given the harms connected to acting as a conscientious objector, you will need to be risk adverse and so Jordan’s ‘disguised selfishness’ charge is invalid. He claims that officers who are given authority over you are nonetheless themselves rather underregulated which (somehow) makes it less likely you’ll be able to act as a moral objector within the army as Dan claims. He suggests conscientious objectors can have more influence outside the army than in it. He now lists personal costs of joining up: the first, the risk of death; the second, the high correlation between homelessness any being a veteran; PTSD; the fact that you are treated by observers on the home front as a statistic. Jordan goes for the jugular and asks, if pacifism prevents killing ‘where did the six million Jews in World War 2 go’. Warwick stumbles for a moment (my view) and then accuses Jordan of a straw man as warfare did itself not save Germany’s Jewish population. Warwick claims the social contract is ‘signed’ from mutual self-interest (though the argument here isn’t obvous I believe it is suppose to be an argument that as your self-interest is not defended by joining the army communitarian analysis like at the end of Dan’s speech does not apply).
Cork says he thinks its really cool he’s made the quarters, though he does intend to make the semis. He states their extension will focus on the fact there are things more important than pacifism. He suggests that the lack of information analysis is trumped by the fact that action always has to result from weighing up multiple factors in a state of informational uncertainty. In a time of war ‘seige mentality’ means that the citizens are less likely to listen to conscientious objectors (not sure this is consistent with what Jordan had to say about Fox News). Cork claims the international community is self-interested (the members of it?) and that any suggestion pacifism would magically change this actually cuts against Hugh’s analysis that propaganda etc are used as a result of the self-interests of states in warfare. Ben reiterates the propaganda effect/informational deficit point. Cork’s reply is a little unclear; he states that the siege mentality is an analogue not a binary (flick of the switch) property, so it isn’t a question of having FULL or NO information (makes sense in the context of the above remark on the nature of decision making). He states that it is as more if not more important to consider the lives of people who survive in assessing the morality of killing. Hugh states that the US citizens of the 60s believed they were members of a peaceful democracy but committed genocide in Cambodia; how can you ever have confidence in the rightness of your action. Cork say that ‘in general’ you should be assumed to have a right as to whether in a particular instance the act of fighting in a particular war is ‘morally pure’. This is not ideal, but neither is the world and living involves weighing up factors and that pacifism should never be ‘the default action’.
“In a world” where we can never know the true harms of our act of killing in warfare, we should err on the side of moral caution. Warwick claims that Opp states wars should be assessed on a case by case basis and claims his partner gave you ‘clear reasons’ why this could not happen. You never know whether your state is right or not, citing as an example of informational deficit the claim ‘WW1 would be over by Christmas’ (he namechecks the Kuwait example but does not respond to it; the burden here is /never/ though, so leaving an example on the table might be a mistake). He praises Oxford for their Kantian account of the abrogation of responsibility in the military and claims KCL ignored it. He states that his partner showed that we don’t do evil just because if we don’t someone else will; “we don’t sell drugs to children because otherwise another drug dealer will” (audience laughs). Given that you do not understand why you are going to war and that the individual on the other side is in the same position you cannot morally choose to put yourself in a position to take their life. The punishments of not going to war and the inducements to do so means being a conscientious objector is not a role of the risk adverse. He states the second ‘flashpoint’ of the debate is over utilitarian comparisons; first opposition ignores the personal harms of warfare and the right of the individual to protect themselves and furthermore cannot legitimately claim it to be selfish because more killing (and harm) results from warfare than pacifism. Jordan challenges; surely if a war is aggressive on one side it must be defensive on the other. Warwick replies that they are not suggesting you do not have a right to defend yourself and the comparison is illegitimate (there seems to be some muttering in the audience over this). He reiterates that the case has been made that structural properties involve show it is never a morally appropriate act to fight in the army so the opposition wins.
Becky complains that Warwick did not deal with Cork’s extension. If as Oxford says individuals are so valuable that their moral purity must be upheld. If the lives of people in other countries are intrinsically valuable then the lives of people in your own country are surely also intrinsically valuable, and attributes to Warwick the claim that your immediate family are valuable (in the context of the personal harms discussion, I believe) they already recognise responsibilites to certain compatriots and it is a short move to moral duties for compatriots in general as a result in partipation in the democratic state, so the burden on prop to show it is always immoral to join the army has not been met. While we do not know always what the motives about states lying to them, it is disingenuous to implicitly set this debate in the 1960s given the response to propaganda at that time has been a major increase in the difficulty of hiding information from citizens during warfare. Becky responds to a Warwick POI by saying that an individual who has been lied to about the reasons for a war is not responsible given the act of lying was the act of the government (not sure; surely they are responsible for acting given they know they might be or are probably being lied to was Oxford’s point). Proposition are valuing their own moral purity higher than the lives and wellbeing of their compatriots which contradicts their own claim about the moral significance of lives. If closing believes the right to self defense is trumps the ‘right to live’ of an aggressor why does the right to defend the lives of my compatriots yeild a similar effect. Oppositon are not obliged to show that all warfare is justified merely that some instances of warfare are.
The chat after the round suggests most people believe it to be top half (which is good). Everyone agrees that Warwick is out, in part due to an overall weakness of their extension (which is largely the personal costs of warfare following KCL’s accusation of the prop line as motivated by selfishness), but primarily due to the absurd concession to Jordan’s self-defense POI. I would appear to be the only person who believes Cork to be in with a chance, due to Becky’s response to logic of the two main Oxford contentions (1: that informational uncertainty necessitates inaction and 2: that the imperative to maintain ‘moral purity’ means the need to avoid potentially wrongful killing) being much clearer than the response they had received from KCL (which is apparently not a universally shared view) and that the responses plausibly appeared in the extension (which not everyone else agrees on); the response to the information point in particular is something a lot of people believe was missing from the extension; I believe it’s present, albeit unclearly, in the cryptic remark about light switches. That said, I’m happy enough with the prevailing consensus that there was enough of a response to both sides of the prop case for them to go through. It does seem odd to me that the obvious wedding of the ‘not fighting wars may have negative consequences’ to the ‘uncertainty justifies inaction’ was not given (that given you cannot be certain your inaction will not lead to thoroughly horrendous consequences, your decision not to fight in a war which /seems/ justified is unsupportable) though many of the elements were implicit in Dan and Jordan’s case. As I’ve said to them it’s unfortunate that a lot of the argumentation was IMplicit and they should make it much clearer in the next round. For those keeping score between moral theories this is one of those weird problems that arises from the fact that consequences /do/ play some role in Kantian ethics in the form of consequential effects in the world of universally applied norms).
As far as other rooms are concerned, Cambridge A are reportedly certainly through, probably carrying the other opp team with them.
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