Conflicts

One is always dismayed by bad ethical choices in an activity supposedly all about ethics. All of our discussions, at least on paper, are intended to be about the right thing to do, but that does not necessarily mean we always do the right thing, even when the rightness of a thing is absolutely clear. As a community we should be ashamed of ourselves in those situations. But clearly we are not. Those of us who are much more interested in winning a debate round over every other consideration need to question their motivation. Those of us who are willing to resort to unethical means to win those debate rounds need to change their ways. Yes, we can all argue our way out of the tightest paper bag, but that does not make our arguments in favor of unethical decisions correct.

I will reprint the document here that describes the nature of a conflict:

Conflicts are defined as situations where debaters are perceived to have an unfair

favorable advantage with a judge, usually due to previous working or personal

relationships. Situations where you feel a judge is prejudiced against any of your

students, for any reason, should be handled by strikes and preferencing, and not by

conflicts.

A judge conflict exists with a student:

• whose high school the judge attended in recent years;
• to whom the judge is related;
• who attends a school with whom the judge has had a coaching or judging relationship, paid or unpaid, during the past two school years (does not apply if the only relationship to a school was as a hired judged at that school’s tournament);
• who attends a school that has offered to hire the judge to coach or judge for the team in the future;
• for whom the judge has ever had primary instructional responsibility as, e.g., a school coach or a personal coach;
• with whom the judge has or has had in the past personal friendships or romantic relationships, or with whom the judges socializes in non-debate settings;
• who personally has provided a judge’s transportation or housing at this tournament, or who attends a school that has provided the judge’s transportation or housing at this tournament;
• who has been hired by, or who has an outstanding explicit or implicit offer from, a debate business (e.g., workshop or brief company) to which the judge has financial ties;
• if the judge’s current, or in the past two years, coach of record is currently coaching the student;
• If the judge coaches or debates for a college/university, any student that is debating for the judge’s program next year or whom the judge’s school is still actively recruiting;
• with whose coach(es) the judge has or had in the past had romantic relationships;
• to whom the judge bears any other relationship that might reasonably be thought to compromise the judge’s impartiality as a judge. To determine whether a relationship meets this test, the judge might ask, “If I were a competing student and knew nothing about my judge except that he or she bore the relationship in question to my competitor or my competitors coach, would I have any doubts about his or her impartiality?” If the answer is “yes,” that is a conflict.

The first paragraph says it all: “Conflicts are defined as situations where debaters are perceived to have an unfair favorable advantage with a judge, usually due to previous working or personal relationships. Situations where you feel a judge is prejudiced against any of your students, for any reason, should be handled by strikes and preferencing, and not by conflicts.” The rest is just examples for the sake of clarity.

Conflicts are, quite obviously, not meant to include people you don’t want to be judged by, for whatever reason. If the point is that a judge could be perceived as giving you an unfair advantage, then a judge who has always dropped you in the past, a judge that disagrees with your politics, a judge who does not like your style of debate, a judge who is a [blank]ist and you are a [blank], or any other judge who could be perceived as giving you an unfair disadvantage, does not fill the definition of a conflict. There are no shades of meaning here. There is no hard-to-find bright line. This is a clear as day. Conflicts are for judges with whom you have a personal or professional relationship. End of story.

The only argument that matters about the use of conflicts is that they are meant to cover one specific (and rather broad) area of perceived favorable prejudice. Any other use of conflicts, especially to eliminate unfavorable prejudice, is wrong on face. That is sufficient reason to regard the use conflicts as they are meant to be used as the only ethical possibility.

But let’s look at the facts. At the average circuit tournament, there are 50 judges or so, at least. We’ll have 87 at Yale, and well over 100 at Bronx, to take two examples. In the normal course of events, 10% of those will be strikes, and another third will be 4s and 5s, categories one is progressively less likely to encounter as a field grows in size. In other words, between strikes and low ranks, you can pretty much insure that you will not be judged by around 45% of the field, except in the most unusual circumstances (which, by the way, will exist for both you and your opponent, this being a mutual judge assignment). Which means that the people misusing conflicts as strikes, are eliminating even more judges from possibly judging them. We’ve already reached the point where nearly half the pool will not judge a debater, and the debater adds even more to that number, with the use of scurrilous conflicts. Not only is this the mark of an unethical debater, it is the mark of an apparently incompetent debater who sees half the world as ballots he or she cannot pick up. (Incidentally, the more conflicts one adds into the mix, the smaller one’s universe of each ranking becomes, so this debater is shrinking the likelihood of mutuality, and probably albeit inadvertently screwing themselves in a totally unexpected way.) The fact that misuse of conflicts is self-evidently ludicrous and in aid of bad debating practices—limiting one’s need to pick up a variety of judges, and therefore skill in doing so—are not really reasons not to misuse conflicts, as we’ve already demonstrated that to do so is wrong on face. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the consequential ramifications of so doing.

Another ramification, and much more heinous, is that if a debater enters a conflict into their tabroom.com record, that conflict will hold at all tournaments. Since a conflict is meant to be an objective thing, reflecting a real relationship, it doesn’t come and go with the tides. It would always hold. So even at a tournament offering no strikes (and there still are a few of these), a debater can surreptitiously strike a judge by claiming a non-existent conflict. Of course, at a tournament with no strikes, a conflict of the appropriate sort would still hold, which is at it should be. A conflict to get an unwarranted strike would be fraudulent.

I think that when we first started talking about conflicts, it might have been unclear what the limits of that meant. I had honest and open discussions early on with people who had construed them differently from the way we’ve defined it above. I don’t think that is true anymore. I do think that a tournament needs to post its conflict rules in advance (the ones here are on the NDCA site, although not specifically their conflict rules), so that there can be no dispute, but after that, well, there is no dispute. Needless to say, this is something that has caught my attention, and which I will continue paying close attention to. I hope that others do likewise.