The classic model of argumentation within LD, and debate at large, is the Toulmin model. Toulmin developed his claim/warrant/impact model because he wanted to shift the philosophical emphasis onto epistemic justification and away from truth. In his opinion, deductive arguments were too absolutist: the premises *entail* the conclusion thus guaranteeing its 100% veridical probability. So his nondeductive model solved this problem and made the “warrant” the primary issue of concern.

If this is the bread-and-butter style of argumentation for LD then a holistic paradigm ought to be a macro-level representation of what occurs on the micro-level in-round. Accordingly, a justification-oriented paradigm is a holistic representation of a justification-oriented argument. Worldview desirability, however, does not inherently need to concern itself with justification. If desiderata can be non-epistemic, then there is no inherent symmetry between what occurs on the line-by-line (i.e. micro-level) and how the round is decided (i.e. macro-level). Any convergence is coincidental unlike Palmer’s position where convergence of the macro-level with the micro-level is essential as the both concern justification.

If we assess arguments based on justification, it seems intuitive that we should assess advocacies based on justification. There’s no need to introduce an additional concept of “desirability.”

(1) Rationality.

Understanding the round purely in terms of the desirability of a given worldview admits the possibility that the desiderata expressed about a worldview may be non-epistemic. Since debate is a rational activity and rationality is predicated on certain epistemic norms being respected, assenting to a worldview on non-epistemic grounds would moreorless be non-rational. For instance, assenting to p merely because, say, it might make one happy when there is (a) no evidence for p, (b) evidence for ~p, would not be a rational decision. Thus, the worldview desirability method has no necessary connection to rational deliberation. One could fix this problem by adding a condition to the theory that the desiderata must be epistemic. But, i’m not sure this wouldn’t collapse Nelson’s paradigm into Palmer’s.

Regardless, Palmer’s justification-based alternative does have a necessary connection to rationality. If the winner of a round is (s)he who justifies their propositions better than their opponent, then this perfectly mirrors norms of rationality. For example, where one is deciding between p and q, if q has more evidential support than p, it would be irrational to assent to p because of its inferiority of justification to q which would be the only rational choice.

If debate education is about training students to be quicker, clearer, and better thinkers (i.e. ‘rational actors’) then the paradigm that has a necessary connection to rationality and its norms is the preferable theory.

(2) Hypotesting.

The problem pre-standards arguments cause is a shift away from, to borrow Mangus’s terms, vertical spreading to horizontal spreading. NC spreads don’t need to go deep (i.e. vertical) on an AC advocacy if they can put out multiple apriori arguments that force the AC into defensively dealing with a number of pre-advocacy hoops to jump through. Worldview desirability doesn’t deter horizontal spreads because the NC still has the available strategy of putting out multiple worldviews that are independent of each other. I could imagine a fast enough debater putting out 10-15 coherent worldview alternatives, each complete with a net-benefit to case, and still answering the AC. If one of these were dropped, then the AC would loss under this paradigm because its a net-beneficial alternative to case thats been conceded as desirable.

Palmer’s paradigm does deter horizontal spreading. If the NC does run multiple worldview alternatives, counterplans, etc, then this will always trade-off with the level of justification these off-case positions can have. So if an NC runs 10 scantily warranted positions and if the AC has one position that is deeply warranted, then the AC will always be ahead in terms of justifying their position and thereby the ballot. However, if the NC runs only 2+ major positions then there is less of a trade-off between the number of positions and their justification. In turn, this incentivizes debaters to spread vertically which results in more clash, and more substantive comparison. To succeed on this paradigm, then, a debater needs to write better cases, and perform better in rounds to win because they can’t rely on the strategy of multiple, multiple off-case positions being undercovered.

Inclining competitors to engage each other’s advocacy more by providing an incentive to debate vertically and a disincentive to debate horizontally, is a definite educational benefit. In this way too, it seems that Palmer’s paradigm is preferable.

On the question at hand: I don’t understand what the problem is with philosophy-experienced coaches becoming higher in demand. First, I don’t think that it will ever be the case that a coach with philosophy expertise will be necessary to succeed. If your concern is that the material is so difficult to understand, the ignorance of the judging pool will prevent those kind of arguments from being run successfully. If the material is easy to understand but hard to find, any benefit that a philosophy guru coach has is gone the first time a case is broken.
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But even if it does happen, I don’t know what’s unique about it. There are good coaches now and having a good coach makes you more likely to succeed. In the future, there will be good coaches of a slightly different type (more likely to be a philosophy major, I guess?) who will also make you more likely to succeed. If anything, it should be alarming that swanky hired-gun coaching has moved from luxury to necessity that should be alarming more than the nature of those coaches.

framed that way, your concern is far more reasonable. there’s probably a limit, granted, to how much of any subject we may require debaters to learn. my claim is that when it comes to ethical theory, we may safely ask more of debaters than we do right now. your claim is that Eric’s conception of debate risks going too far in what it requires. I don’t really see why, but I have no proactive reason to think you’re wrong…certain parts of his article lend themselves to my belief, and certain parts justify your doubts. In other words, I guess we don’t meaningfully disagree…

My concern isn’t that debaters are going to have to learn about philosophy, my concern is that debaters with coaches who are phil. students will have an big advantage. Either way though, there is such a thing as expecting an unreasonable amount from debaters. There is some truth to “term-spec” - as Post put it in his round against Palmer at camp, nobody should have to be a phil. major to have success in LD.

Michael,

I totally see your point on #1 - I’ve just never seen it in practice (out of the few policy rounds I’ve seen). on the #2 - I do think that coaches with backgrounds in philosophy tend to have the best debaters (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing). Most of the very successful teams this season - MVLA, Trinity Prep, and Edina namely, have coaches who have really strong philosophical backgrounds. I don’t know if any shift in paradigms will make the influence of philosophical education become much much greater than it is in the status quo, I just kind of fear the “act util good” vs. “rule util good” debate that Eric suggests may occur under his framework.

two things. first of all, i dont think competing worlds automatically entails utility. the desirability of taking an action can be explained in any number of ways, including deontological imperatives. it might be objected that the paradigm assumes a form of cost-benefit analysis, but costs and benefits can be more than just utilitarian - deontological impacts can have a very high “magnitude” (either cost or benefit) from a decision-making perspective even if that magnitude is not expressed in terms of a body count. decsion-makers can also assess the relative risk of deontological impacts coming to pass. in other words, the ‘probability*magnitude’ approach does not assume that magnitude be expressed through any particular ethical theory.

second, i still dont see how your objection doesnt link to the status quo so to speak. it may be the case that in our present moment little attention is paid to the ethical theory that undergirds the standard, but i can certainly recall a number of occasions from days gone by where important debates hinged entirely on arguments about the substance of the criterion - eric’s semis round at emory vs justin hinojoza is legendary for this. im not saying that every debate used to be like that, but i think people did and probably still do debate ethics more than you give them credit for. regardless, if all the philosophy-trained coaches are capable of wreaking such havoc, why arent they doing it now? i am confident that most judges would consider a well-executed and intelligent standards debate to be extremely refreshing. trust me, i hate ‘no bright-line’ just as much as the next guy. if phil students were gonna take over debate they couldve done it already.

why is the literature on ethical theories inaccessible? I guess I don’t see why it’s a ridiculous idea to ask debaters to learn something about moral theories, particularly when that literature is no more or less accessible than any of the other things kids are running…you can find it on JSTOR, for instance, or in your local bookstore or library.

I’m also quite sympathetic to Adam’s (torson…we need nicknames to tell you and adam nelson apart, seriously) argument that learning about ethical theories and making those considerations transparent is the unique educational value that LD should bring. I mean, I have my own problems with Eric’s paradigm, but “it forces kids to learn more than they do right now” is not among them…

“The obvious remedy to this problem [of exaggerating link-stories and impacts] is to insist that standards express ethical theories…Some might object to this suggestion on the grounds that it generates an unacceptable situation in which all standards debate devolves into a hackneyed dispute between deontology and consequentialism. This is not so: there are not only a wide variety of versions of each of those ethical theories which are designed to cope with the familiar objections, but there are also some alternative moral theories which break the deadlock altogether.”

I think what Eric (and maybe this has less to do with your paradigm since it seems that “Competing Worlds” generally accepts util) is conceding here is that his method of evaluation involves a greater degree of debate about which ethical theories are preferable. The problem I have with this is, as I said, is that the typical debater will probably need to have a much greater understanding of philosophy to have a good impact debate under this framework. I think the way LD avoids this is by making standards debate less focused on the ethical theory behind the standard and more on what using the standard will entail (i.e. which standard must be met before the other can be met, etc.). LD also has a lot of nit-picky bullshit standards argumentation which avoids this problem (I don’t know if I’ve been in a round in which I didn’t say “no bright-line”), but even that may be preferable to an uninformed philosophical debate about theories that debaters don’t really understand well or have access to.