In the most technical sense, a 1NC that requires the 1AC to demonstrate how repeated domestic abuse is consistent with these requirements is indeed holding the AC to multiple necessary but insufficient burdens. This should say more about our impoverished burdens theory than it does the “abusiveness” of the NC strategy.

After all, in many instances, the 1AC is advancing self-defense as a justification. The 1NC is no more responsible for the constituent requirements of such an argument than is logic. If the 1AC tacitly accepts a multitude of burdens by running a position with several moving parts, then so be it. Whether or not that’s strategic is another question. On this topic, self-defense is a compelling position, so it’s actually somewhat reasonable for its positional value to trade-off with an “un-strategic” adoption of multiple burdens. Either way, though, this was the 1AC’s choice. With even a cursory examination of the literature discussing the multiple requirements of self-defense justifications, any AFF debater should be abundantly prepared to engage multiple arguments on multiple fronts.

There are several additional reasons why the 1NC should be entitled to exploit multiple burdens (i.e. imminence, necessity, proportionality).

First, the 1AC has chosen to adopt ground that is extremely difficult to refute on any foundational or ethical level. The vast majority of normative frameworks accept the inviolability of self-defense. If we don’t allow 1NCs to challenge the application of these normative principles to actual events, then we’re far more likely to see debates that are horrible for 1ACs strategically and fundamentally side-step topic literature. Would affirmative debaters really prefer that 1NCs make ludicrous philosophical pleas, arguing that self-defense is ethically baseless? Would they prefer for 1NCs to argue that self-defense is a construct of Westernized, “racist” logocentrism? Are these better debates for the 1AR? It seems much easier to just be ready to go on front-lines for for imminence, et al.

Second, we shouldn’t be treating “burdens” as all-or-nothing premises. This has more to do with the viral skepticism infecting our community of judges, but debaters should be the first ones to take a stand. If a round ends and the judge believes the AFF ultimately did a better job than the NEG on the imminence debate, the judge should probably give that thread of the debate to the AFF. Of course, every judge will have his or her own thresholds (and that’s fine), but there’s really no world in which the AFF should be expected to meet (or “prove”) a burden 100%, whatever that would even mean. In a world where the 1NC has highlighted multiple burdens, perhaps the appropriate solution is for debaters to seek (and for judges to grant) leeway in their thresholds for each burden. In other words, if the 1NC makes the debate about imminence exclusively, the 1AR should be expected to do a very good job on the imminence debate. If, however, the 1NC deploys three distinct burdens, then judges should hold the 1AR to lesser thresholds for each independent burden. This is probably somewhat inevitable in a world where the 1NC’s arguments are fragmented and less developed than they would be in a world where they focused entirely on imminence.

Third, the problem with necessary but insufficient burdens really has less to do with some fictive approximation of reciprocity and more to do with its concrete effects on the 1AR’s strategy. We should be concerned about 1NC tactics that render large portions of the 1AC irrelevant. That’s the real threat to AFF ballots. It may come in the form of multiple burdens, framework games, skepticism or any other manner of shenanigans—we should be less concerned with the contours of the NEG strategy, and more concerned with its functional effect on the 1AR. In the instance of self-defense positions, there may be multiple burdens, but they’re positional in nature. The 1AR should be able to extend arguments from case that speak to the issue, and if they can’t, that probably indicates a major problem with the 1AC. I’ve seen 1ACs run evidence that speaks to imminence and necessity alike. If one piece of evidence can be successfully leveraged against a supposed whirlwind of impossible burdens, AFF debaters really don’t have much to worry about.

If the opening “spikes” of the average 1AC are any indication, it’s hard for AFF debaters to win rounds these days. As a judge, apparently I’m supposed to do everything at my disposal to help these victims of circumstance (default AFF, accept AFF interpretations, roll out a red carpet, etc.). I’ve always been willing to help Affirmative debaters, but only when they help themselves.

The decision to abandon the 1AC to restart the debate in the 1AR is, in my opinion, advisable only in the most dire of circumstances. With the consistent and woeful failure of most 1NCs to actually engage and respond to the AC, I can’t understand the insistence of 1ARs to abandon their six-minute cases and run disingenuous NIBs shells. If those cases had a shred of well-developed, offensive evidence… the 1AR might be in a better position to actually debate. As long as 1ACs are stacked with defensive preempts and esoteric frameworks, I guess I can’t blame a debater from wanting to start over. A 1AC that doesn’t really want to affirm is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When debaters sign up for this activity, I think they should be prepared to defend both sides of the topic. And, I don’t think that obligation stops in the 1AR. If theory in the 1AR isn’t grounded by an egregious violation, judges should be calling these routines out. Force AFF debaters to actually debate—it might just be good for them in the long term. The whining has been going on for years, and it’s never demonstrated a consistent benefit to AFF wining percentages. This NIBs fad is only the latest in a line of grievances that lazy debaters have when informed they actually have to beat someone’s argument. There’s a time and a place for it to be sure, but the self-defense debate isn’t it.

There are a variety of factors to consider. The basic concern is that it may be unfair to give a debater a chance to give the same rebuttal twice. They may articulate arguments more clearly or efficiently, or make different strategic choices. Additionally, judges have an opportunity to hear the same argument or arguments twice, and so are more likely to follow them. There are reasonable exceptions to this basic logic. When a debater realizes five seconds into a speech that her timer didn’t start, it seems reasonable to simply restart. This is especially true if the speech is a constructive, where the debater is just reading and therefore doesn’t have the opportunity to meaningfully improve her performance.

What is the appropriate way to evaluate close calls? For example, if a debater is twenty or thirty seconds into a speech, is it appropriate to restart it because a timer didn’t start? At Stanford several years ago I encountered a strange situation where a debater started the 1AR before one of the judges on his panel had returned from the bathroom. The judge missed about 20 seconds of the speech, and the debater’s opponent objected to a restart. Should an opponent’s objection be definitive in a situation like this, or should the judge decide whether or not a restart is reasonable given the circumstances?

Some would argue that a restart is never appropriate. Debaters have an obligation to manage their time and equipment like timers and computers, and if something goes wrong they just have to be all that much more efficient with their remaining speech time. Is this unreasonably harsh or the only fair way to handle situations like this?

1. Use Citations

To research well, you have to realize that someone has already done your work for you (in a manner of speaking). Scholarly articles are themselves a product of research in the topic area. So, collect citations from the articles you read. If you see one source cited over and over again, you know it is probably a cornerstone of the topic literature. You shouldn’t spend half of your research time combing the 15^th page of Google Scholar for just the right article. Find one solid, well-footnoted article and work from there.

2. Use the Library

While the bulk of your research is probably going to be electronic, there are still two good reasons to use the library (especially a good college library if you have access). First, once again, someone has done your research for you. The Dewey Decimal System organizes books by subject area. If you find one book that is relevant to the topic area, you are likely to find a shelf full of relevant books all around it.

Second, books offer something a little different than most journal articles. They tend to be more comprehensive, which gives you a good grounding in the fundamentals of the topic area. Also, the arguments in books tend to be more in-depth – the authors have virtually unlimited space to delve into the topic. Often journal articles are written by scholars with a passing interest in the topic or even by graduate or law students. Folks who have put in the time and research necessary to write a book are often (though not always) experts. So, it may well be worth your time to head to the library and read some real 3D books like they did back in the 20^th century.

3. You Don’t Have to Read Every Word

Debaters get bogged down starting at the beginning and reading every word of an article to find out if it’s useful. That’s usually unnecessary. You should always start by reading the abstract, introduction, and conclusion of an article to assess whether it’s useful. If it’s not what you’re looking for, move on. If an article looks promising, go through it reading the first sentence of every paragraph. If it is well-written, you should be able to follow the article surprisingly well. When you zero in on something you want to cut, then you can get down to the nitty-gritty and read every word so you know precisely what you are cutting.

Caveat: Reading efficiently does not mean reading lazily. Many debaters use “skimming” as an excuse to actually get nothing out of an article at all. When you are reading the first sentences of every paragraph or some other skimming method, you should be focusing and trying to follow the article. If you are not following the thesis of an article, then you are not reading properly.

The irony is deafening.

If there’s anything sincere about these debates, we should at least be committed to having a robust discussion when time limits aren’t constraining us. To that end, I’d like to advance a discussion of the “internal link” to education.

Traditionally, Lincoln-Douglas “value” debate was intended as a laboratory for persuasion and communication. As these discursive virtues have given way to rapid delivery and sharing cases via jump drive, it’s sometimes hard to understand why we even have these debates in person anymore (perhaps our typing skills would benefit from an online competition?). And, imagine the cost-savings to debating from home.

Today, pedagogical goals on the national circuit are said to include quick analytical thinking, research skills, and deepened familiarity with topics.

I will certainly vouch for the importance of research skills. If today’s debate rounds actually reflected an investment in research, I’d happily encourage debaters to read as much evidence as possible.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. Fragments of evidence are read in rapid sequence with little to no analysis. Evidence itself is rarely engaged with any scrutiny or counter-evidence. The spectacle is pure mockery of evidence-based debate.

To be sure, debaters are becoming well-trained in rapid critical thinking, but whatever’s gained by the increasingly intricate tactics is unquestionably trading off with sophisticated strategic planning. These kinds of skills might be valuable if debaters plan to be working under incredibly short time constraints their whole lives, but I suspect most could benefit from exercising more strategic judgment. I’ve watched countless debaters inject theory into a debate for short-term tactical games only to find themselves in a risky quagmire two speeches later.

Most of the average debater’s thinking goes into what kind of irrelevant off-case position they can use to derail the debate. The few debaters who’ve committed themselves to reading thorough and responsive evidence against a 1AC have found consistent and superlative success. The schizophrenic side-shows typifying most 1NCs are as good for my brain as Happy Hour.

I’m also saddened by the loss of the topic. After the 1AC, I’d be shocked if half the rounds I’ve watched this year had anything to do with the topic. That’s ridiculous.

In the few debates that don’t spiral into theoretical self-gratification, 90% of the dialogue has either to do with tangential philosophical non-sense or absurd and un-researched armchair speculation.

A genuine re-commitment to sound pedagogical principles should begin with a few premises:

First, if clarity is so profoundly ignored that a judge must re-read a debater’s entire position, then we are wasting money to attend tournaments. Have the events online and make them more accessible to disadvantaged communities. If we’re going to pay ridiculous sums of money to fly half-way across he country and let opponents read our cases from their own computers, we might as well be burning piles of money every weekend too. Here’s something most debaters already know but should probably also care about: People have to communicate in life. You can’t “flash” them everything you’re too lazy to say clearly.

Second, we need to start debating the topic. It’s actually depressing to listen to people make spurious claims about topicality while they actively destroy any ability whatsoever to debate the topic. Unless the violation is very serious, just don’t.

Third, when theoretical discussions of education do emerge, our arguments need to be genuine. You know that “depth” isn’t so valuable that you should be able to run a plan about cavity-searches on the 2011 Jan-Feb topic. You know “breadth” isn’t a reason you can ignore the text of the topic. And, you know that debating the meaning of the term “deliberate” is a lot less educational that debating whether or not victims of domestic violence should be able to kill their abusers.

If you know that what you’re doing is quite possibly wrong, definitely annoying, and true in only the most imaginative sense, then don’t do it. Debaters act surprised when judges vote against them for making ridiculous arguments. Judges should be discouraging nihilism at every turn. They’re the last line of defense for incentivizing sound debate.

This isn’t Boggle!

Debate is not just a game. It may be a game, but it’s also a unique opportunity to do something very few people ever get a chance to do. We should be better stewards of that opportunity and make our arguments count for something. That begins with an honest discussion about what that “something” is… what we should be trying to learn from our debates, and what we should be trying to teach.

At the very least: The next time you find yourself telling your judge why you ‘control the internal link to education,’ first decide if you actually mean it.

I tend to believe that judges should time rounds. It is a failsafe for when debaters’ timers fail or when debaters accidentally give themselves or their opponents too much or too little time. It is also a check on debaters stealing prep time, or using an unreasonable amount of time “off the clock” to transfer files or organize papers.

In many rounds, though, judges elect not to time and instead rely on the debaters “cross-timing” one another. For some reason this seems to be particularly prevalent in out-rounds. There are several possible arguments in favor of this approach. Many judges presume that debaters should be responsible for policing themselves, and that the appropriate checks on timing abuses are good faith and an opponent guarding her right to a fair round. Certainly not having to time makes judging easier, which may arguably improve the judging experience and improve the quality of decisions (i.e. judges can focus on writing on ballots or backflowing rather than watching the clock).

So, should judges time rounds or may they rely on debaters’ cross-timing?

Last week I argued that debaters should have more respect for the preferences of judges. This week I will cover the other side of the equation: the responsibility of judges to be more honest and open about their preferences.

Judges clearly have preferences beyond which arguments they absolutely will, or will not vote on. To their detriment, debaters do not seem to care about what these preferences might be. However, students are not entirely to blame.  If one browses through judge paradigms it is hard not to notice how entirely unhelpful most of them really are. The vast majority of paradigms focus on marginally helpful things like a judge’s threshold for speed, while saying almost nothing about the types of arguments they want to hear. The same is true when debaters ask paradigm questions before rounds.

When it comes to the substance of arguments most judges simply repeat the refrain: “I will vote for anything as long as it is clear,” or some equivalent.  While it may be true in the abstract that these judges could imagine themselves voting for any argument, all judges have arguments, and ways of making arguments, that they are more or less likely to vote for.  That type information should be the most useful to debaters because it gives them insight into how to increase their odds of winning a ballot, not just if it is possible to win it. However, this type of useful information is the information that you are least likely to find looking through a paradigm. Why is that?

I think there are a couple of factors at work here:

First, students generally do not ask good questions so judges perception of the information demanded is skewed toward the irrelevant.

Second, judges are afraid of being seen as a “bad judge.” Honesty has been conflated with bias and “interventionism.” A judge who expresses their honest point of view about arguments is perceived to be a “bad” because their preferences may not align with the preferences of some debaters.  Quite a few coaches and judges have privately told me that they do not express how they feel about certain arguments that they feel are bad for the activity because they are worried about no  longer being preferred judges. The natural human desire to feel respected and liked is leading many judges to be as non-controversial as possible by hiding their real opinions.  All of this is is understandable, but it is also cowardly and harmful to students who take judges at their word.

The problem, of course, is that whether or not they express them openly, those preferences still exist. The only difference is that only the judge knows what those preferences are.  This lack of information introduces randomness that otherwise would not exist. As long as a debater knows what a judge likes they can adapt to it. That is fair. What is not fair is a judge giving the impression that all arguments are equal to them, when that is not, and could not be the case. A good judge is a predictable judge, not simply a judge that will tells a debater they can do whatever they want.

I have a feeling some of this might be misinterpreted, so let me be clear: I am not saying judges should intervene more. What I am saying is that all judges already do intervene, in large and small ways, in every round. Telling debaters that you will “vote for anything” may be technically true, but it is also deeply dishonest. We all have arguments that we dislike, or that annoy us more than others.  Judges owe it to debaters to disclose as much as possible how they tend to intervene by laying out the types of arguments and strategies they do and do not prefer.

Grow a spine and take a stand. It is a matter of respect.

I’ve created a survey to figure out what people think about various judging principles, debate practices, and aspects of debate today. As a community, we may wish to do some soul searching to figure out what kind of activity LD really is, and what kind of activity we really want it to be. Many of these questions get at issues I discussed in my earlier post, Minimal Expectations for Clarity in LD. Please click here to fill out the survey. Every answer helps. I know the wording of each question is not perfect, and may sometimes even be bad, but please answer the question that you think I’m asking, to the best of your abilities.

Also, I apologize in advance for any weird formatting problems. GoogleDocs isn’t the greatest tool for this task, but it is free…

Thanks!

On to the substance of today’s post: what position will win the TOC?

I’ll try not to answer my own question (since I’m more interested in others’ thoughts), but I will say this: debaters are doing themselves a strategic disservice by running away from the plausibly true positions on this topic. I describe the loss as a “strategic” one, because I’m reasonably certain that no one will be persuaded by pedagogical risks.

The debates that start off on dubious premises (thanks to ridiculous case positions) almost always become side-tracked by theoretical and procedural questions that can rarely be resolved predictably. This is especially true in elimination rounds against strong competitors—the marginal utility of a “non-stock” position is significantly diminished when assured that your opponent will either shift the debate to theory or respond with an even more “outside the box” argument. The race to the bottom of absurdity can quickly become a counterproductive exercise, or one that at best terminates in a coin-flip decision.

While I hesitate to make any predictions, I certainly hope that high-level debates will explore the contextually unique accounts of self-defense that tend to permeate this topic in real-world discussion. I believe that the most researched account of this issue can and should take center stage. Off-the-wall positions may be decisive in prelims and lesser tournaments, but the most consistently and universally successful positions are true ones.

What do you expect to see come out on top?

An “I meet” argument is an answer to theory which claims that there is no violation – the debater has complied with the rule proposed by the interpretation. For example, if the 1NC runs theory arguing that the AC may not employ contingent standards, and the 1AR argues correctly that the AC does not employ contingent standards, there has been no violation and the affirmative debater should not lose on theory.

If an “I meet” argument is conceded, judges will almost universally regard it as terminal defense – defense sufficient to defeat the theory position entirely such that it has no weight in the decision calculus. (See Jake Nebel’s article from yesterday for good reasons why the debater running theory should have the burden of proof that there is in fact a violation.) This is an exception to the general rule, because we often say that terminal defense is impossible or rare – there is almost always a possibility that the impact claimed by a debater will happen despite a defensive argument.

There are cases where treating “I meet” arguments as terminal defense is easy – for example when the argument is conceded. If offending debater did not in fact do anything objectionable, then she should not lose on theory. However, the decision becomes more difficult when the “I meet,” argument is contested. Suppose in the example above that the negative argues that an ambiguous part of the AC could be reasonably interpreted as a contingent standard, so the Aff does not meet the interp. Now the judge must conclude that there is some probability that the affirmative violates and some probability that she doesn’t. If the judge concludes that the affirmative debater is marginally ahead on the “I meet” argument (e.g. the affirmative case is reasonably clear but not entirely unambiguous), is it still appropriate to treat the “I meet” as terminal defense? If not, does it make sense to force debaters to defend an objectionable practice which they are simultaneously claiming they have not used?

The core problem is that clear communication of arguments is becoming rare. I support the use of academic philosophy in debate, but I sometimes think that debaters have adopted the bad habits of academic philosophers without carrying over the good ones. I have seen a large and increasing number of debates where judges and opponents alike have, at best, a partial grasp of the claims being made and the arguments used to support them — and not because they are lazy, stupid, or uninformed. (I include myself here. More of my decisions this year have included, “I didn’t understand p, why you think p is true, or why p justifies q,” than ever before… And I don’t think it’s because I’ve become much lazier, dumber, or more uninformed than I have always been.) Some of this has to do with speed and delivery, but much of it also has to do with a desire to economize and cut down on explanation in order to get more out there.

There are two major, mutually reinforcing disadvantages of this trend.

(1) When debaters don’t really understand each other’s arguments, clash becomes superficial. This decreases the educational benefits of running these arguments, since people rarely have to understand either their own arguments or their opponents in much depth in order to win. I take it that at least one reason why debate matters is because it fosters effective argumentation skills, so this impact should be relevant to anyone who cares about debate. I also take it that one reason why debate should involve philosophical arguments is because debaters learn something valuable from debating philosophy, so this impact should also be relevant to anyone who cares, more specifically, about philosophical education in debate. I care a lot about these things, so this disadvantage really matters to me.

(2) When debaters are unclear, judges are more likely to vote on claims that they do not understand. Why is this bad? Consider an extreme example to highlight the claim: suppose that judges let debaters speak incomprehensibly and vote for whatever they think is won based on the lines and arrows. That kind of system would be awful because (a) judges would often make bad decisions, and (b) debaters should not be expected to respond to arguments that the judge could not understand. I think (b) is the more important impact here, and perhaps the most important impact of the trend discussed here, but (a) is really important too. Bad decisions are bad for everyone, because it means that people leave a tournament with undeserved losses.

There are other disadvantages that crop up in different kinds of cases. Ambiguity in the framework leads to awful debates about whether some turn links to the standard, when it was never initially clear (to anyone!) what it took to link to the standard. Theory debates often turn on tiny questions that weren’t clearly explored by anyone, rather than developed arguments about what makes debate a meaningful activity. Finally, lower thresholds for clarity lead debaters to think that recycling a complicated card is OK, because the judge is likely to understand it already. I think that expectation is often false. But it is also harmful, because it lowers the incentive to make arguments because they are good, interesting, or important (as opposed to being familiar). People may not care about these impacts as much — I think they are important but not as important as the (1) and (2) above.

Here are some judging norms that, if practiced, would redirect debaters’ incentives towards clarity. I’ve skipped over the obvious ones like, “Don’t vote for claims that you don’t understand at all,” and, “Only vote for arguments.”

1. Ignore or assign low weight to claims expressed in undefined philosophical or technical terms.

Good philosophy papers are easy to read even though they deal with difficult subjects, because they are clear. Good philosophers explain what they mean by technical terms before using them. This practice prevents confusion, and it also prevents equivocation (when you use the same word in different senses in different parts of your argument). Defining technical terms makes people less likely to talk past each other, and more likely to engage in productive, rational disagreement.

This expectation should apply to any “ism” (yes, even “utilitarianism” and “consequentialism,” which mean different things) and to any word that debaters or their evidence use in a non-ordinary sense. It should also apply to technical debate terms when used to establish burdens or theory arguments. People mean very different things by “presumption,” “turn ground,” and “offense.” I’m fine with people using those terms to make things clearer (e.g., “Turn: [insert argument here]”), but debaters are increasingly using these terms to establish rules about those concepts, in which case it’s really important for them to explain what they mean. Basically, any time someone says, “I/you need to prove X in order to win/not lose,” the debater should explain X in non-technical terms.

If you are at all skeptical of this point, just think about the last time you saw a debate about “internalism,” necessary but insufficient burdens, or competing interpretations.

By “assign low weight” to such claims, I mean that, when in conflict, you should prefer claims that are stated clearly and explained to claims that use undefined terms.

2. Do not call for anything except quoted evidence or advocacy texts.

Calling for analytics and reading them — or even checking them — after the debate creates a counterproductive safety net for debaters to get by with incoherence, underdevelopment, and ambiguity. I see this happen a lot in theory debates and in framework debates that involve lots of spikes. This is unfair to the other debater because s/he had to catch, understand, and reply to the argument under time pressure, based on its first articulation. A judge who misses or doesn’t understand an argument should not expect a debater to answer it.

Even if you’re just checking to see if a claim was stated, that contributes to the problem. The relevant question is not whether a debater said something, but whether you understood it, which usually requires hearing it said. If you don’t have an argument on your flow or remember it being said, you should ignore it. It is the debater’s responsibility to make sure the judge understands the argument.

I can foresee people defending this practice by placing the blame on themselves. They might say something like, “I wouldn’t call the analytics if the ambiguity were their fault, but I just sometimes zone out or don’t pay attention or fail to get something down that I should have.” These judges should probably try to fix this or, otherwise, tell debaters that they have this problem in advance. But they shouldn’t just let debaters be as unclear as they want and retroactively clean things up by reading their analytics.

By “advocacy texts,” I mean things like plan texts, permutations, and theory interpretations. I think it’s okay to call those things because the precise wording may be especially relevant, and judges shouldn’t be expected to write down or remember every word.

3. Do not read debaters’ evidence to improve your understanding of the argument.

If you didn’t understand it, just don’t vote for it. You have no obligation to understand what a debater could not communicate effectively from the start. In fact, you have an obligation to the other debater not to give his/her opponent this kind of undeserved charity. Why should they have to respond to arguments with only a few minutes of prep time when you get to review a card with minimal pressure for as long as you please? That is an unfair expectation, and it is especially unrealistic because it creates an even greater incentive to run complicated arguments with minimal explanation and clarity.

This expectation does not apply to cases where a card’s content or meaning was in dispute, which sometimes requires the judge’s evaluation to figure out who’s right. That seems fine.

This expectation (arguably) applies to some kinds of evidence but not to others. For instance, I don’t think that empirical evidence supported by experiments or studies should require a high amount of explanation, unless those experiments or studies are in dispute. I think this exception also extends to highly technical warrants for plausible claims — for instance, a deduction from logical axioms. The debater should have to be able to explain those axioms, experiments, studies, etc., if questioned, but understanding the claim may be enough, unless it’s disputed. Note, however, that the answer here follows from a more general view about the degree of understanding you require in order to vote on an argument of a certain kind. That more general question is important, but it’s not specific to this particular expectation.

4. Ignore non sequiturs even if dropped.

A non sequitur is an argument whose conclusion does not follow from its premises. Debaters make non sequiturs all the time, and I think it’s getting worse and worse. Why do you, as a judge, have to interfere in this habit? Debaters have a strategic incentive to cut down on premises, so they have just enough to maintain the appearance that the conclusion follows. And they have an incentive to hide any implicit premises that would cast doubt on the argument’s validity. So, if you don’t draw the line at all, you’re just contributing to the problem.

The best arguments against judge intervention have to do with judges’ evaluations of claims’ plausibility. These arguments justify a world where judges do not ignore arguments simply because they disagree with the premises or with the conclusion. But they do not apply to the form of arguments — that is, to their validity or to their status as arguments.

What kind of decisions does this expectation rule out? The cases I have in mind are decisions where the judge assigns a function to arguments without being able to explain why the argument has that function. Here are some examples:

a. Arguments that say, “There are no moral facts, so affirm/negate because everything is morally permissible,” without a reason why, if there are no moral facts, then everything is morally permissible.
b. Arguments that say, “Affirm/negate if there are no moral facts,” and “Neither side has advanced a true moral theory,” without a reason why, if neither side has advanced a true moral theory, then there are no moral facts.
c. Arguments that say, “The aff/neg is unfair,” and “Fairness is important,” without a reason why unfairness (in this particular case) is a voting issue rather than a reason to drop the argument.

Note that this expectation does not rule out all unsupported claims. This expectation only applies to arguments, which require at least one premise in support of a claim. Sometimes debaters just make claims without arguments, which makes sense because justification must end somewhere, but I don’t have a proposal here to distinguish between plausible and implausible claims.

5. When evaluating theory, the burden of proof is on the person initiating theory to justify the violation.

The burden of proof is not on the defender to win the “I meet.” The person running theory has to show that his/her opponent broke the rule. New responses to an “I meet” are often just new warrants for the violation, which should have been in the first speech. Violations are often way too vague to have a clear grasp of whether the opponent really did break the rule. This is an area where judges have to figure out who is right because the arguments on the flow are rarely decisive.

Sometimes people make an argument that, if we accept competing interpretations, then even a risk of a violation is sufficient to vote. That’s a bad argument, and I expect that if people followed rule #1 (explain debate jargon and philosophical terms), they would see why. Competing interpretations is a way to evaluate theory once you’ve established the violation, the details of which are rarely established in any particular round. But the common feature of any plausible reading of competing interpretations is that it determines, in some way, how we figure out who won the theory debate. If there is no violation, there is no theory debate, and there is no offense: it’s an impact with no link, which is not an impact at all.

I suspect that judges are sometimes reluctant to ignore a large theory debate because one debater spends a lot of time on it. That’s a bad judging habit. You should not care how much time someone is spending on an argument if that argument is not shown to be relevant.

Conclusion

This activity is supposed to be about rational disagreement. But we are awful at it. Our disagreements are irrational outside of debates because, in my experience, most of us rarely change our minds. This shortcoming is not unique to debate, but I think we are particularly bad at it because (1) many of us our stubborn, (2) many of us care too much about consistency with our past beliefs and about our egos, and (3) many of us have learned how to defend false beliefs persuasively. We are also really bad at facilitating rational disagreement where it matters most — in round. Debaters often talk past each other, avoid clash, and make bad (invalid, unsound) arguments because they know they’ll get away with it by pushing the limits of clarity.

I have left many issues off this list because I want to focus on expectations to which everyone (or almost everyone) can agree. I find some of these issues very important but I’m not confident about what to do about them. One example here is respect: how is it okay for debaters to be disrespectful to each other when the disrespect doesn’t help them communicate their ideas more effectively?! I hope we can form some shared expectations about respect, but I suspect that we could only do so after we reach agreement on other issues (even though I think those issues are less important than respect).

There are plenty of bad habits in debate, and I don’t think that any of us are to blame for it. But perhaps if we apply some minimal expectations to our judging, debate will get better: debaters might learn more, debate better, and make the activity more worthwhile for everyone.