Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The injustice of justice; -273.15 degrees Celsius; the Summer of Love

I spent a little time with Justice last night. The problem is complex. People have been thinking about justice since what seems the beginning of time. At best, we can come up with a general sense of what it is, but the minute you start pinning it down, it looks up at you as if you’ve got a hole in your head and points to something you just said and shows you how that is entirely wrong, which is soooo frustrating. Normally the fact that a concept is slippery would not bother me all that much. Plenty of philosophical concepts are slippery, so what’s new this time? Well, the thing about justice is that it seems to inform practically every LD resolution. We are constantly saying that we are attempting to achieve justice, which forces us to explain what it is that we are achieving. While we all, perhaps instinctively, have a sense of what justice is, that’s not always good enough for a debate round. Certainly the fly-by phrase doesn’t capture it, i.e., “giving everyone their due” or “defined as fairness.” And at the point where we’re trying to achieve something that we can’t categorically define, even though we clearly know and agree that the thing exists roughly a certain way, there are people who will take advantage of your lack of a categorical definition, easily going so far as to say that your concept of justice must therefore be false, and often going to the extreme and saying that justice itself is a false construct. Show of hands, ladies and germs: how many people noticed that the new list of LD resolutions only uses the word “just” once? (All right. Actually, it’s the word “unjust”.) Maybe the committee is tired of nailing this particular jelly to the wall? Could be, folks, could be. It’s been explicit so often in resolutions lately, maybe they’re hoping that someone will finally come up with a new value or two in the rounds themselves. Now for a while, I don’t think. We’ll have to shake off a lot of old justice dust first.

In any case, I will end up with a working definition, plus some historical analysis and some applications. At the point at which a debater can argue successfully that there is no such thing as justice, we have performatively proven the existence of justice by performing an act of injustice (picking up that argument), thus confirming the positive by confirming the negative. Can’t have cold without hot, in other words. For that matter, all you need is colder; even if you can’t prove the existence of absolute zero, you can demonstrate one thing is colder than another, and the colder one is the closer of the two to the absolute. If cold is the goal, the colder one wins. Same thing applies to selling your soul to the devil, which never happens with an atheist. I mean, if the devil came up to an atheist and said, sell me your soul, the atheist would immediately see that the existence of the devil, the negative, proves the existence of God, the positive, and therefore, would keep his (un-)damned soul to himself. (What? Selling your soul to the devil is a metaphor? Now they tell me!)

I see that institutes have started up, along no doubt with the annual drive by instituters to get passed the resolutions they trained on during the summer. There may be a cart/horse situation here in terms of why they chose to train on those rezzes in the first place, but this practice does afford undue theoretical advantage to institute students above and beyond the sheer act of having gone to the institute. The good news is that almost every case written on a rez at an institute sorta sucks. A self-correcting machine of sorts, then. In the past one of my hardest coaching jobs has been demonstrating to campers the errors of their institutional ways. Occasionally they haven’t believed me and debated their summer loves, and the resulting heartbreak, while predictable, has still brought a tear to the eye. Summer loves are chimerical. Trust me on that. Not that I’m not in favor of institutes: I rather like the idea, actually. It’s just the cases themselves that are problematic. Wait till Yale. You’ll see.

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