Phil Kerpen
By Direct Advocacy, I mean the advocacy of the position held by a
particular philosophy *in the debate.* For example, making the arguments
that an Ecofeminist would make about how the plan is a bad idea, or the
language used by the affirmative is bad. You might call this a ``kritik'',
but I side with the recent theorists, most notably Antonucci, who hold
that this term has no unique meaning, and for the most part only obscures
the contents of any particular argument.
The alternative to Direct Advocacy, or at least the most common one, is
the Movements Disad. The basic argument of the Movements Disad is that
the affirmative plan in some way stops the mobilization of a movement
toward a particular philosophy, and that philosophy would be good. (The
fact that the link is usually a specious quiescence argument is a serious
problem that I will not deal with here.) This is a forn of indirect
advocacy, because it does not entail arguing from the supported
philosophical perspective. As such, the Movements Disad, or any other
form of indirect advocacy, transforms the substance of the philosophy into
an internal link. The philosophy becomes simply a link in the chain
leading to the ultimate impact that the philosophy solves for some impact.
In other words, the Movements Disad ignores what the philosophy *is*, and
is concerned only with what the philosophy *does* in some consequential
sense.
No, this problem is not unique to arguments in the Movements Disad format.
There are some shallow, poor debates in which a philosophy is argued as
direct advocacy, and yet the substance of the philosophy is ignored, and
the debate becomes about external impacts. That's a bad thing. But at
least the Direct Advocacy model makes it possible to understand the
substance of a philosophy. An example: When I ran Rights Masking as a
Movements Disad, I knew nothing about CLS. NOTHING. All I knew was that
granting rights masked oppression, which stopped the movement toward
equality, which outweighed all. When I started to make Direct Advocacy
type CLS arguments about the aff using the legal system and the law being
indeterminate and oppressive, I gained an understanding of what some
CLSers were actually getting at.
Movements Disads are, for the most part, bad arguments. The Movements
Disad, historically, was a sort of hack; it was an attempt to bring
serious concerns about the philosophical underpinnings of affirmatives
into a restrictive debate context. But in doing so, it stripped away the
substance of those philosophies, preventing debaters from actually
learning alternative perspectives and thinking critically. Direct
Advocacy of different philosophical positions solves this problem.
Sometimes Direct Advocacy fits well into traditional debate constructs; it
may indict harms or solvency. Sometimes, though, it requires the
reconceptualization of burdens normally associated with ``kritik''.
(Which I mean here in Gill's sense of something different from normal
debate practice.) This expansion of argumentation beyond traditional
limits is good; it teaches debaters to be critical of even the most basic
assumptions, and it teaches them to defend those assumptions.
Now, some arguments that do not fit the Direct Advocacy model of saying
what supporters of your particular philosophy would way are labeled
``kritiks.'' Some of them are just disads with normative impacts. Some
are disads with qualitative impacts. (I've definitely noticed this trend;
if a disad has an impact other than a body count, it's labeled
``kritik.'') Some are, no doubt, movements positions which are even
shoddier than usual, perhaps without uniqueness. These are, without a
doubt, even worse than the Movements Disad. If you want to run a
Movements Disad, then be honest about it, and structure it properly. The
argument *is* a legitimate reason to vote against a plan; Direct Advocacy
is just pedagogically superior.
I wrote this short piece because I was highly disturbed by a recent
comment that philosophical arguments should always be presented as the
Movements Disad. The Direct Advocacy model offers a far deeper
understanding of the relevant philosophical literature, and also makes
debaters uphold a stricter advocacy burden; they must defend that there
implicit or explicit philosophical understandings are in fact correct. If
we view debate as a dialectical process, then it is impossible to defend
the practice of excluding arguments or forcing them into a format which
trivializes their substance.
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