I’m rather taken with the fact that last night at our meeting we had a rather extended yet far from exhaustive discussion of nov-dec. We haven’t even gone into possible arguments yet, but we’ve spent a lot of time looking at the subject from various angles. Unlike the jejune sept-oct, where its purity quickly turned into sterility, there’s a lot of ways of looking at the question. First and foremost is why we suggest that felons shouldn’t have the vote in the first place. The history of voting, at least in the US, is a history of exclusions, from the non-propertied to blacks to women at various times. Each of these exclusions seems arbitrarily prejudicial, for obvious reasons. Excluding felons, on the other hand, at least makes intuitive sense at some level. They have done something that warrants their exclusion from the democracy of which they are members, and thus they have warranted their exclusion from the democratic process. On face, that’s reasonable enough, but the more you look at it and think about it, the less convincing it feels. Compare this to the bugaboo of non-citizens voting. I forget which topic led to discussions of this, but by me it was a no-brainer. If you’re not a member of the polity, you don’t have a warrant for acting as if you are, and voting is probably the single act most emblematic of being that member. This was similarly intuitive, but a lot deeper. At the point where non-citizens can vote, then anyone can vote, because you’ve removed the one meaningful qualification from the equation, i.e., membership in the polity. Not being a citizen of one country naturally means that you are a citizen of some other country, and would be voting there, even if you’re not living there. We don’t suggest that tourists ought to vote if they happen to be here in November. Alien residents, compared to tourists, are simply a matter of degree. Apparently some communities do, in fact, allow resident aliens to vote, but that is more an act of niceness on their part, the fulfillment of a negative rather than a positive obligation. Anyhow, thoughts on the felons bring up all kinds of interesting skeins and depths of logic—much more than thoughts of pure morality—and we’ll definitely be keeping at it for a while. Meanwhile, some folks will be debating this up at Manchester-Under-the-Sea, and that’s less than two weeks away. Time to sharpen those virtual pencils!
It’s interesting that the subject of sept-oct, which has caused the Modest Novice to rise from the dead, resulted in an instant nonsense thread over on WTF. At least one person bravely pointed out during the skirmish that the fear of all rounds being about utilitarianism v. deontology was unwarranted, and that there was plenty of other things to talk about. Really? With this resolution? The mind boggles. The problem is that U v. D is sort of inarguable, not that you can ignore the conflict completely in a resolution that, philosophically (and practically) speaking, is about nothing else. Worse, the deontological argument is difficult to make, while the utilitarian argument is (perhaps) empirically proven as an intuition in the cross-cultural morality tests. That is, Hauser suggests that we are hard-wired to vote aff, whereas voting neg means accepting an exegesis on human worth that even Kant had problems with. Not that everyone votes aff in a round, but that the arguments are not created equal, which leads to odd debates. From the educational view, however, the difficulty of grokking the ontology/relativism of the neg is rather stupefying, which is why the Modest N is back. Do you really want to teach deontology to 13 year olds their first week on the team?
I have a pile of strikes and rankings from Jake, plus O’C keeps adding judges, which means more strikes and rankings. It’s time to start subtracting judges! Who needs ‘em? The only thing better than removing judges from debate tournaments would be removing debaters. Anyhow, it’s fun to see who gets pretty even rankings and whose rankings are all over the map. There’s the people you love and the people you hate and everybody loves and hates different people, except for the couple whom everyone loves or everyone hates. How does one get to be so universally loved or universally reviled? Anyhow, that’s why I like community rankings. I do like having stronger judges on the bubbles, and why not let the community at large decide, albeit anonymously, who those stronger judges might be? That way, you get what you paid for, without exactly eliminating the ones you fear. That is, you can strike a handful, but you’re stuck with the rest. Someone you ranked a C could be most people’s A, and then you’ve got them in the round so suck it up. Of course, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, it was thought that a good debater ought to be able to pick up just about any ballot, and should adjust to the judge rather than the other way around. We’ve come a long way since then (mostly in the wrong direction, but, as they say, Viva Pfffft!).
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