Here's Why You Shouldn't Run Policy Criteria
We’re back to our series on Omni.
When a value debate starts, a judge can’t presume a way to decide whether or not it’s true.
Resolved: Country life is better than city life.
The judge may have some preferences or biases, but they’re not supposed to bring those into the round. Both sides could just fling contentions at each other, but without a way to compare those contentions, the judge is still lost. The decision is particularly overwhelming because the contentions are probably making general observations. So almost all cases require a Value statement where you explain how the judge should measure the resolution and why. For the resolution above, the affirmative might run a value of Peace.
Value arguments are so important to that ecosystem that some debaters understandably try to translate it to policy.
Resolved: Emily should move from Brooklyn to the mountains of Alaska.
Affirmative: My criterion is PEACE - so if Emily’s life will be more peaceful after the affirmative plan, we win.
Unfortunately, the mindset that was so critical to value debate doesn’t translate well to policy debate.
Negative: Emily can’t afford to move. Plus, she loves living in Brooklyn. Plus, her job and all her friends are there.
Affirmative: My group response to all these arguments is NO IMPACT. Since they don’t relate to my criterion, they don’t matter.
The dead giveaway that policy criteria don’t work is that, almost invariably, the affirmative will undermine their own framework by running arguments that don’t relate to it. For example, they might add an advantage that Emily will be breathing cleaner air.
Why is this? Don’t judges need a way to evaluate policy decisions, too?
Absolutely! The problem is that they already have one: Net Benefits, aka Impact Calculus, aka Benefit Analysis. That says we should look at all the results of a plan, weigh them together, and compare them with the negative option. The negative option is usually the status quo, but it could be a counterplan. If the plan creates a better world, we should go with it.
That’s not the only way to argue affirmative. You could argue that the judge shouldn’t care about results at all. For example, you might say that we should do the right thing regardless of consequences. These arguments are coherent, but they’re very niche and rarely viable.
On the other hand, arguing that the judge should only look at some effects and ignore others - like only looking at Emily’s peace of mind, while ignoring the loss of her career - is unjustifiable.
It’s impossible to make a good decision when you’re arbitrarily ignoring some aspects of it.
The best defense anyone can create for a policy criterion - that it’s really important - still doesn’t mean we should ignore everything else. You can make the same argument in other contexts where it hits a lot harder. So instead of criteria, all post-presumption arguments can be divided into two basic categories.
Benefit: An argument claiming that the plan is more beneficial than the negative option.
There are two Benefits: Harms and Advantages.
Detriment: An argument claiming that the negative option is better than the plan.
There are three Detriments: Disadvantages, Costs, and Backfires.
These 5 argument classes should make up the bulk of most Omni debates. Each one has a particular sub-point structure. Significance and Solvency are absorbed into them. Many other concepts, like Inherency or Off-Case Solvency, are obsolete. And most exciting, two of the three Detriments are new argument classes created for Omni.
There’s a lot of ground to explore here.
We’ll go through it step-by-step, starting with affirmative offense. Check back soon.