Can you go into more depth about how the V/VC section works?
What should I value on each topic, and why? How do the two relate to the topic itself?
Why shouldn't I just value life every round then say "life subsumes all your values because you can't have ______ if you're dead"?
The NFL puts it this way: “A value is an ideal held by individuals, societies, governments, etc. Debaters are encouraged to develop argumentation based upon a values perspective.” This is a relatively reasonable definition of value. It is something important, and something that is, at some level, transcendent, either individually or socially. That is, societies, and members of societies, hold some things as supremely important. Our traditional sense of what it means to be an individual (and this sense may be culturally determined) is to have the freedom to do what you want to do, short of harming others and free from harm yourself. So, freedom/liberty is a personal value. We believe that societies should treat everyone equally, hence equal treatment of individuals is a societal value. Justice, which is another way of saying equal treatment of individuals, is a societal value. Morality, i.e., the desire to do good and/or not do bad, is at least an individual value, and perhaps construable as a societal value. These are the big ones: justice, morality, freedom. All rezzes can’t always connect to them, but the best ones usually can. One could argue, as I noted above parenthetically, that all of these concepts are culturally determined, and not applicable to all individuals/societies, but that would be denying the social/cultural history that informs our thinking in the first place. That is, we can claim that individual rights are a “western” concept via the Enlightenment philosophers, i.e., a theoretical claim by a select group of unique people, and that this thinking is parochial and not applicable universally. (Kant, if I’m not mistaken, being one of these Enlightenment people, addresses this very issue, but that’s beside the point.) But at best this is a critique of the Enlightenment and a claim for relativism that seems difficult to successfully assert in a debate round that takes place within the culture that includes these important philosophers as part of its moral/ethical canon.
All right. I got off the point there a little.
Anyhow, for the sake of orthodoxy, we (usually) agree that there are a handful of so-called good things that we want to achieve, and among these are freedom and equality and their various subsets. Protection of rights falls in here, of course, usually considered as a government’s obligation. From a social contract perspective, that’s what governments do: they protect rights. At CatNats, where the question was whether we had a right to health care, it would be virtually impossible to successfully argue that right from a soc con perspective, given the literature and general thinking on soc con. Health care is, simply put, not a right within the direct context of the social contract. Successful arguments in favor needed to go beyond canonical soc con into areas of infrastructure and the like, proving that governments have an obligation to do something beyond soc con. Personally, I feel that they do have such an obligation: governments ought to do more than just protect us from each other. (Few Pfffters that I judged at CatNats, btw, really seemed to understand soc con. The actual winning team, which I judged in semis, knew it inside out. So do most LDers.)
There are many ways to argue around these core value concepts, but usually one or the other of these core concepts is the goal we are trying to achieve. We achieve it through a very specific mechanism, which is the criterion. Our goal is justice, say; we achieve it through guaranteeing more rights, perhaps. V = J, C = Prot Rs. If the CatNats topic had been LD, maybe V=Gov legitimacy (which means that the gov is doing what it’s supposed to do) and the C = fulfilling gov obligations. Case in favor of health care would prove that it is an obligation of the government to provide it, otherwise the gov is not doing what it is supposed to do, i.e., performing legitimately. People arguing for health care as a right would avoid soc con like, well, something you need a lot of health care to recover from.
The more specific and practical a criterion is, the better it is, insofar as it is the weighing mechanism for determining if a value is achieved and, therefore, for the judges, the lens through which the round is viewed. Which gets to the real point of the deal, which is that the case must provide whatever the criterion promises. That is, if your criterion is that you will protect more rights, then your case ought to show how you protect rights. You demonstrate how your opponent does not protect (as least as many) rights. When it comes time for the judge to weigh, the adjudicator puts all the rights on the scale and the most rights protected, wins. (I wish it were always that easy.)
Bad debate, as often as not, disconnects the framework from the contentions. The argumentation is only tangentially about what the debaters are claiming it must be about. They claim, for example, that the best way to achieve justice, the V, is through rights protection, the C, and then argue something that has nothing to do with rights protection at all. As I like to put it, V/C is like the icing on the wrong cake. If you can’t end every contention with a line to the affect that this gives you C which achieves V (not necessarily literally, but figuratively, or maybe literally if you’re a novice), then there’s something wrong somewhere.
Finally, why doesn’t the value of life, or say the right to life, trump everything? Well, what makes life worth living? If it’s just life per se, we would keep people alive at all costs, even if they’re in a degenerative, vegetative state. We wouldn’t die anymore; we’d just go on respirators until we couldn’t afford the electricity bill. Often rezzes are directly concerned with quality of life. Sometimes it’s a matter of “life in a box” versus freedom. One certainly needs to be alive to enjoy one’s other rights, but arguably, one also needs to be free to enjoy one’s right to life. In other words, there are no trumps in the card game of LD.
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