I have tried running excellence as a value for the entirety of the season. And I'm finding that it creates a problem that I would rather avoid. If you have found a way to deal with my concerns, I congratulate you. But here's how I see it:
A value is a standard for judging the round, a lens to measure if something is a good idea. In many cases, the aff and neg will uphold different standards. Their positions should logically and empirically further their particular values. The job of the debater is to show how their value is superior, and thus the side that achieves it better (ie their own) should be voted for. Many people follow this up by saying that their side also furthers the opposing side's value. Thus, by either standard, the vote goes to their side.
Well and good. But, what if your value is excellence? Consider what happens if both sides agree on the value. Then it turns into a criterion clash. Which is appropriate, except that so often the conflicting criteria don't even lead the same thing! How can a philosophy that works for individual benefit end up with the same result as one where success is defined by the success of the group? Individual achievement and shared achievement are different ends, obtained by different processes.
Impact: this makes it much harder to say that your criterion leads to the value of excellence better than the other person's criterion. Unless you have some way to distinguish your different interpretations of excellence, (because I highly, highly, doubt that you can say that your criterion achieves ALL sides of excellence) refutation becomes very messy. It's unclear to anyone what gets where, and to top it off, you lose one of the most valuable tools for convincing the judge that they should vote for you. Your value is what impacts the judge, makes them care for your side. "Excellence" isn't persuasive unless it's specified.
I haven't found any criterion that leads to all facets of excellence and that I won't have to compare to any specific value. That's why I think that instead of having excellence as your value, and using your criterion as a secondary value, it's more clear and persuasive to have an actual value.
7 comments:
:headdesk: I've been saying all season that it's difficult and even nonsensical to have excellence as one's value, and no one will listen to me. Thank you for articulating my peeve!
So yeah. Troo dat.
"The job of the debater is to show how their value is superior, and thus the side that achieves it better (ie their own) should be voted for. "
Here, I'm inclined to (very slightly) disagree. The job of the debater is prove the resolution true (or false), and values are simply the justifications for doing so. That's important, because even though the resolution is poorly constructed as far as values go, it doesn't change the debaters' job.
This resolution really doesn't do a very good job letting LD-ers debate they way they're used to debating... simply because it has an assumed value and assumed criterion already. But as annoying as adopting the implicit case seems, I think that the alternative makes for even worse debate.
If you take something else as a value, what purpose does it serve? Take, for example, the competition of ideas case - that usually goes along with a value of truth, right? We can have a great debate about whether competition of cooperation is better at achieving truth, but doing so allows excellence to fall out of the picture. There are really two ways of making room for both excellence and truth.
The first is to define excellence as truth. When we say that something is excellent, we really mean that it is true. This is being explained poorly, but I think you understand what I'm saying. The problem with this approach is that it's basically creating parametrics for LD. Introducing another value into the round - on neg - is essentially the same thing as challenging the definition of excellence. And if the aff argues that his case is simply narrowing the round... well, he has only proved the resolution true in one instance, and not as whole.
Now, sure, there's ground to argue here. You can argue debate theory and talk about parametrics. A slightly more appealing way of debating this would be to use the word superior in the resolution. Essentially, whichever side of the resolution is best at achieving the highest value is true. ...Actually, the that hadn't occurred to me before. Let's go with this for a second. With this, you have two levels of clash. First, you have the clash over which value is highest. Second, you have clash over which achieves either value best. By essentially defining excellence as the summation of values, and arguing that superior only needs to mean the method that achieves the higher of the two values in the round, you can have some good debate. Of course, it's still parametrics, just inclusive parametrics.
The second [way of making room for both excellence and truth] is to say that the value is what leads to excellence. This is really just turning your value into a criterion, and then arguing about which method within the resolution is going to best uphold the value. There's still good debate potential here: as the neg you can assume the aff value and then argue that cooperation works better at achieving the value and therefore excellence. Or, you could introduce an alternate value and argue that it is a better means - which just turns into a criterion war because - with this method - it really is just excellence as the highest value... just not explicitly.
Ultimately, I think any attempts to use a value other than excellence are going to have problems because the resolution has an implicit value.
Does using excellence as a value create problems? Yeah, kind of. But I think trying to get around that is to attempt to warp the resolution into saying something it's not. At the very least, any attempt at upholding the resolution as a whole statement is going to involve excellence as a goal... because that's really what we're talking about. And just because we're used to choosing our values doesn't mean that we get to in this resolution.
So... I guess that means I respectfully disagree.
"We can have a great debate about whether competition of cooperation is better at achieving truth, but doing so allows excellence to fall out of the picture." As I learned when I read your dad's ballot for one of Maggie's rounds, that is false. Excellence doesn't fall out of the picture, but it qualifies the truth-achieving process. Is excellence achieved when competition promotes truth, becomes the question.
I was talking about this with Liz on Wednesday, how excellence is not an end but a state of being. Excellence describes and qualifies the condition of the value through competition/cooperation.
In essence, "excellence" in the resolution serves to force a link between one's value/criterion and the resolution: does competition uphold your value generally, or does it uphold it to a state of excellence, sees to be the point. Like most resolutional actors, it serves to limit an incredibly broad resolution, I don't think it's an implicit value at all.
"You can argue debate theory and talk about parametrics." Bah. hah. hah.
Mostly, I've found from the rounds I've judged this year, the clash is clearer and everything is easier when excellence isn't being debated. Excellence is supposed to be the measure stick of the cases and the resolution, but most people [and I guess I'd include myself in that] don't know how to run that properly.
I guess to choose between your two ways, Micah, I'd support the parametrics view. So I think that the value should be shown to be excellent, or a form of excellence.
Part of the reason I think choosing your own value is so important is because I don't see excellence as a value in itself. To be excellent is to be "Of the highest or finest quality; exceptionally good of its kind." Or, excellence is a process of excelling, of surpassing others in merit. It's extremely, extremely vague. Technically, excellence is valuable, but running excellence seems similar to saying your value is "glorifying God." (I don't think that would happen, but it's an analogy.) There are many ways to glorify God, and while it's something you should always do, it needs specificity to make an impact on how people act.
Now about the question of "warping the resolution." I really don't believe I'm going against the original intent of the resolution. Excellence, in my mind, has the connotation of being a better world, a better person, a better idea. It's generality makes it applicable to whatever specific value the affirmative chooses. And I don't think the makers of the resolution formed it without knowing that debaters would find it very hard to support all sides of the resolution at once.
Perhaps they included the word excellence so that competition and cooperation would be valued pragmatically, on what they achieve, not on what they are. While I can't know for certain, I think it's acceptable to do what TPers do and only tackle a specific aspect at once. But of course the other side is free to argue that that the value is insignificant.
I seem to be saying that there is a middle ground between redefining excellence and making your value "lead to" excellence. What I mean is, that a specific value other than excellence shouldn't be viewed as just a stepping stone on the path to excellence. Excellence isn't a defined enough thing for a criterion to lead to it. I think that you can say your value *is* excellence, is a small sense, without saying that other values can't be excellent as well. As if... the only way you reach excellent is by making things that are excellent. Kind of like a theory that the only way you see beauty is through beautiful things? This sounds metaphysical.
I'm glad for you to still disagree, I just wanted to say this to hopefully clarify, and let you know that I appreciate you putting so much thought into it.
Hayley: Excellence as a state of being. Do you mean that in an adverbial or adjectival state? As in, you do you mean living excellently (intriguing; haven't put any thought into it) or being excellent?
It's kind of awesome that we've done both TP and LD and so can use whatever lingo suits best. =D
Micah, I disagree. I think that in order for the debate round to be meaningful in anyway, we have to introduce outside values into the round. If we don't define what "excellence" means one way or another, then we're caught up in a wildly abstract debate round, without the real possibility of anything except vague theoretical arguments involved. For instance: "competition isn't looking for excellence" It's a fine argument in theory, but if there is no outside value than it's meaningless to the judge.
I think that it makes more sense to have what you called "inclusive parametrics", or arguing that your value is the most important part of excellence. In this way, the debate round ought to fall into two categories: 1) which value is higher? 2) which side of the resolution gets to that highest value?. This is essentially what every LD debate breaks down into. You want to prove your value is the most important, and then that the resolution gets to that value, and you have to prove both.
Anyway, I think that the resolution is intentionally vague with the word "excellence" in order to allow debaters to create their own parameters (or paremetrics, if you like) for the debate round.
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