How do we consider a principle?

- Knowing what society what to believe

- For example, a person consent to be eaten but still society still thinks that cannibalism is
bad.
Common principles
- “Reparations”
a. Unjust
- Creation of cessation state
a. Creation of specialized state (India - Muslim state)
- war
a. Use of human shields
b. Desecration of religious sites during the war
c. To what extend do we destroy during a war
- Responsibility
a. Should companies pay for environmental damage
b. Unequal wages
- Education should be given to all is not a principal, the principle is how society thinks of a
person who is uneducated

THBT football clubs' reparation when their fans act in a rowdy manner
- What is the principle
a. Responsibility
b. Negligence
- Establish why the principle is true
a. Why is responsibility given to people?
1. If people are negligence
2. Benefits - sell more merch and money = you should hold these footbal
clubs for their action
b. Negligence
1. Because you are negligence, you should ask them to pay
2. In the premise of the football club = owes you reparation
- Prove the importance of the principle
a. Why and how…so what?
b. Every principle will lead to impact
Why principal are important?
- Heavy rhetoric (making your speech sound impactful using imagery)

Utilitarianism
- A subset of consequentialism (every action that we partake in only matters because of
the things that it leads to)
- Consequences matter but only be calculated on the basis on pain and pleasure, the
action only matters in the amount of pain or pleasure (if a good decision create more
pleasure than pain vice versa)
- Maximum happiness to a maximum number of people
 - Utils = there exists a measure to happiness
- In the end if the utils is positive or negative

Super Shiny Principled Arguments pt. 1

By Ashish Kumar | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5pJ2oomZbM&t=63s

“What is the right way to treat human beings in the first place?”

Why make principled arguments?

1. Consequence-free so they make a lot of clarity in the debate → especially for closing
teams. It is necessary to run a detailed argument to win the debate if they are proven.
2. If proven, they are almost impossible to defeat and hard to rebut.
3. Point of the principle argument is not to weigh them up because weighing up is a
utilitarian → looking at the cost of the benefit.

Things to keep in mind

● Principled arguments are arguments
● Don-t half-ass them -- they’re worse than useless.
● Language matters
● Be angry (funny works too)

→ Trying to show the judge that they already believe in what you are trying to prove using
examples and rhetoric.
→ You need to explain that a thought experiment shows what you want to show but also why
it matters. Explain why it proves the one thing you want to show and why there is a moral
theory backing up the outcome that the thought experiment has.
→ Thought experiment can also be used as a POI.

Ethics

Irreducible and overriding normativity - what ought to do

● Moral claims:
○ cannot be reduced to any other normative claim.
○ Are also overriding → no higher ought

Modifying your own moral metrics → modifying the higher court of appeals when it comes to
making decisions, uniquely limits choices → SLAVERY

Problems with Utilitarianism

● Dignity - does not respect because utilitarianism permits humans as means to an end.
○ Harmless Rape → a man has an intercourse with a woman that is unconscious
and never remembers it for all her life and this man never commits and he tells
 no one about it → morally permissible because of increase in pleasure but it
really is morally evil because a man used the woman as a vessel to achieve
pleasure; moral wrong.
○ Christine Korsgaard → something is only good not because it is desired but
because a human being identified and willed it as a good thing. Pleasure is only
good because it is given value from dignity and human autonomy and if the value
comes from dignity and autonomy, it doesn’t make sense to undermine/ignore
human autonomy and dignity in favor of maximizing pleasure. THE
FUNDAMENTAL GOOD IS THE DIGNITY IN BEING HUMAN.
● Relationships
○ Moral relation to every single human being is the same → i don’t have special
obligations to my parents and loved ones
○ Organ donor thought experiment: a patient goes to a clinic with a mild disease
who is compatible with the 4 people and the surgeon has four people dying who
desperately need organ transplants; the doctor murdered this patient, stole their
organs and saved four lives.
■ You owe a special obligation because of the promise given and because
you placed them in a vulnerable situation.
■ Can be applied to immigration → the government has a special
relationship to its citizens which it does not owe to other people in the
world even if they are suffering greatly.
○ Experience machine thought experiment: Invent a machine and if you plug
yourself into it would create a virtual utopia to live out the rest of your life. People
won’t plug themselves into this machine even if they experience happiness
because it is meaningless and fake happiness. Happiness is not in itself
valuable but a by-product of real things which are valuable like friendship,
loyalty, aesthetic appreciation, self-development. Plugging yourself in this
machine is not just wrong but suicide.
○ Truman Show experiment: Suppose a professor at 50 yrs old who lived a really
happy life with his family and career, actually it is the opposite, his colleague think
little of him and children were ashamed of him and his students just humour him,
if this professor finds outs he will be shattered but a utilitarian will think that his
sadness is irrational because the happiness that you experienced in the past
were real and all that matters was the actual happiness → very fucked up. There
is a real sense that we want to actually experience real good things in the
real world as opposed to the happiness that may accompany all of these
things.

Arguing for utilitarianism

● Two strong intuitions in favour of utilitarianism

○ Happiness/ pleasure/ desire/ satisfaction matters.
○ We should ignore arbitrary distinctions between persons.
 ■ My preferences are arbitrary because they happen to reside in this body
and brain. If it is arbitrary, why should I not treat every single human
beings preferences as my own. PROPER REGARD OF OTHER’S
INTERESTS.
● Appeal to needing-to-get-stuff-done.
○ Different preferences → we need metrics to weigh it; utilitarianism gives us
capacity to account for all of this.
● Dealing with thought experiments.

Only 3 ways to resolve “principled clashes”

● Your principle does not exist.

● My principle trumps your principle
● My principle is really your principle, properly applied.

Choice

4 models of Free Choice

● The naive model
○ Choice exists in its fullest form when you have more options. I.e sweatshops that
expands choice. Smaller number of options is more coercive.
● The default model (naive + rationality)
○ For a choice to be something that a state respects, your agency as a human
being must be engaged in that choice in a meaningful way. In order for that to
happen, you have to adhere to some certain basic principles of rationality. It is
often very hard for teams to show that cognitive biases (racism, fear of the
unfamiliar, proximity bias, risk aversion, anchoring bias → not referencing
choices based on outcomes but referencing it to information given beforehand
which anchors that decision) don’t exist or don’t matter enough to undermine the
choice.
● Unfair choices
○ Thought experiment: Walking by a lake and a man is drowning and screaming for
you to help them, it is fucked up if you tell that man sure but you have to promise
me that you give me 50 bucks if I save you. EITHER DIE OR PAY MONEY.
Increasing that person’s options but it is wrong because we just ought to treat
terrible people a bit better. → sweatshops debate which is an unfair choice.
● Manipulated choices
○ You are not truly free unless you can choose the circumstances in which you
made that choice. A robber places a gun in your head: money or your life? →
robber deliberately engineered a situation in which you will obviously choose one
over the other. → capitalist mechanism of the state has conspired to create an
underclass to whom we are now offering these choices and exactly the same
way a robber puts a gun to your head saying your money or your life is perverse
the same way a state says accept there being no minimum wage is also perverse
Rights

“Rights are not things we like” → something is not a right just because it is nice for people to
have it, not even because it is important to have it, not even because it will make the world a
better place.

“Rights are absolute” → rights are designed to be anti-utilitarian. The point of a right is to
prevent the government or another person from undermining your interest to maximize your
social benefit.

3 Types of Rights

● Real “fundamental” rights

● Civil/Political Rights - are legal permissions of power we give people so that we can have
functioning societies i.e the right to vote or to participate in discourse → if i take it away,
nothing will really change but we need those things to have a democracy.
● Legal Rights - i.e i have a right to cross the road or to wear what i want to wear

Claim right - protects a fundamental interest in someone (i.e the right to education of children
because education is good for them) → require you to create obligations and burdens to
other people.
Liberty right - protecting your right to make decisions in certain areas of life → protected sphere
of choice → requires people to not interfere to what you want to do.

1. Real Rights
● Cannot be modified, traded-off, restricted or removed
● Counter-utilitarian / anti-consequentialist
● Extremely rare because many rights have exceptions (but extremely good to
analogize to)
● Exist because they are necessary for human flourishing, or because they are
necessary for you to be treated like a human at all
● If you can’t prove that they are absolute, that’s fine.
● IF WE VIOLATED THIS CONSTANTLY, ARE WE STILL REGARDED AS
HUMAN?
○ There is a high bar to undermine the rights of others.

Arguing for rights

● Analysis
○ Mass surveillance → strong reasons to care about privacy because it undermines
autonomy; multipolar identities crucial to live our lives → we are in control of how
it is used, surveillance undermines that.
○ Analogize to something that is non-contentious.
○ Shove in bad harms if we forgo the right in your analysis.
 ● Analogies, examples, rhetoric
○ Violence as a legitimate response for poverty → good analogy to show that
people have an absolute right to do this; property rights is violent → because
property will always be stolen by another so the implied threat of violence like a
robber pointing a gun into your head, your money or your life is violent even
when they don't press the trigger → implied threat of property is violent means
that you have right to self-defense.
■ Warsaw Ghetto Uprising → knew that they are going to lose | The
uprising is a way to choose the time and means of death. Will you tell
them to go quietly into the night?
● Cheat 1: Utilitarianism
○ Rights are anti-utilitarian.
● Cheat 2: Rule utilitarianism
○ Free from torture is absolute because it means that the government has a
prerogative to do this in other circumstances that are less just → every time they
do, it will broaden the use of torture.

Super Shiny Principled Arguments pt.2

By Ashish Kumar | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4SUMqmWlaw&t=37s

Two broad school of thought where moral obligation comes from:

1. Cognitivism → can figure out what our moral obligations are.
2. Non-cognitivism → you do not figure out what moral obligations are, you just know.
a. Intuitionism → arranging our intuitions in way that broadly fits our morals;
prioritizing and deprioritizing others
→ figure out through logic and experience.

4 Justifications for Democracy

● Legitimate use of state power

● Anti-technocracy argument
● Minimax
● Produces optimal outcomes
● Applications
○ THW hold general elections in times of severe economic crisis
○ THW hold a referendum on {X}
○ THW grant prisoners/children the right to vote → the people who are most
subject to the state power should have some say to what is done to them
(prisoners); for children, freaky when kids are locked up in a hierarchical and
authoritarian environment to go through intellectually abusing system should
have some control over it.
→ A coercive entity (can deprive you of water, electricity, livelihood etc) in want of a justification.
→ All of this power is justified by giving the power to the people to what the state is and the
government is going to be; absent a democratic free and fair vote as well as media, there is no
legitimate justification for a state.
→ Argument for anti-technocracy: the state has no access to your desires and preferences,
states cannot mathematically figure out what the right thing is to do. (trading the rights of
future and present generation → no mathematical formula how much we should weigh →
state is doing a moral judgement call that it has no right to make)

Functions of the Criminal Justice System

● Public Protection (incarceration and deterrence)
● Restitution (compensation; anti-utilitarian argument)
● Rehabilitation
● Retribution - two bits of negative utility and add them together then calling it retribution.
○ Victims
○ Proportionality
○ Does being a democracy necessitate certain attitudes towards punishment (e.g
high/low thresholds for punishment)?
○ Moral Luck - we should not be punishing people for arbitrary reasons
→ Inhumanity - any right you claim involves a burden on another person; legitimate because
you yourself can recognize obligation and responsibility and respond to it (implied moral
exchange)
→ Social contract is a device to test whether or not certain arrangements are okay or not.
→ Second-order desires (above or first order) and first-order desires (sex, territorialism, hunger;
pure sensation) → First order might be to punch you but second order is to not become a
person who punches him.
→ Civil claims - a person is going after you ; Criminal claims - the state is going after you

“Our democracies are premised on the idea that governments take things wrong.” - which
is why we have elections, checks and balances on different sectors of the government. States
might pass laws that are wrong but even if it's right, we might apply it wrong.

Attempted and successful murder - maximum punishment is actually the same because
whether or not the bullet hits you is a question of luck → does not matter

Criminalizing ransom payment - any parent will do anything to save the child → punishing
people who are unlucky enough to not get their children kidnapped (double burden)
→ punishing → the criminal justice system is failing to identify that people are morally
worse than others.

Reparation - “When you are watching a TV stolen by your father from me even if you don’t know
it was stolen, will you give it back to me? You would probably say yes.”

Standard Elements
 ● Showing the general existence of intergenerational/not-utilitarian reparative obligations,
then prove that there is:
○ A past injustice
○ That still affects the present
○ That creates continuing culpability (unjust enrichment)
○ Redress through the suggested policy
→ There is a moral distinction between helping somebody and giving reparation to
someone.

Morality and intelligence are not linked. (Baby are coerced by a smart intelligent individual to
doing stupid things; AI) The good things of what an AI do does not give us any idea of what
his desires are.

If we do manage to control AI it is also bad because we will basically be slave-masters, if AI

is sentient we should not control it.

Stop Sucking at Principles

By Lucia Arce | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIgxr1GzXDU&t=593s

POWERPOINT:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRfUr8uBHhXNZucMzRVwIoKRZBNPoV2J/view

● Intuition pumps - where else do we allow this to exist in society and abide by; make sure
that the philosophy is the same
● Balance the principle and practical (never fucking run two principles ehemm dtu quarters
eheemm)
○ Prove that the practical is a wash or marginal harm so you can edge on
principles.
○ Use in closing to edge against opening but if they are winning the principles
● Rhetoric in debates!! Principles are rhetorical, and it is incredibly useful to make the
judge and ‘feel’ them

Four things that are important to have in a principled argument:

1. Right that you are defending
2. Intuition pump *analogy
3. Explain how this intuition pump is basically the same thing *analogy
4. Why this matters

How do I argue against a principle?

1. Argue directly with the logic of the principle and say that in this circumstance it DOES
NOT APPLY
a. When do we limit them?
i. When it is useful
 ii. When it is beneficial to the protection of the state
iii. NEVER, they are inalienable
b. But most commonly,
i. Consent
ii. JS Mill’s Harm Principle
1. Freedom until it causes harm
2. How direct is the causation?
3. What about communitarian harms?
iii. Under right specific circumstances
2. Weigh it → even if analysis
● There are always going to be people who can and cannot consent, people
who agree that organs are somehow magic and special and people who see it as
just equivalent to selling hair - the important thing is that the state is not
allowed to make that decision for you - same as abortion, some people
might be pro-life and others pro-choice but the state shouldn’t unilaterally
decide for you, but rather allow people to make a choice. When you do that,
you can also implement measures (MAXIMIZING CONSENT) to try and ensure
consent, and respect people’s choice to enshrine organs as special or to use
their bodily autonomy and sell them, which is WHY we value choice overall.