NCFCA Lincoln-Douglas 2021-22 Resolution Voting Guide
The new resolutions have arrived. If you haven’t yet, check out our thoughts on the removal of “Resolved: …” in the previous post.
Speaking of which: our last post proved that we are more than happy to give positive reviews when they have been earned. We don’t delight in tearing down the hard work of the framers. But if we see a bad resolution, we’ll say so. No one is helped by minced words. This post will be scathing because we believe in the process. We also know, because of how awesome the policy resolutions are, that the league can do better.
Imposing conditions on humanitarian aid is morally justified.
The Good
There’s an interesting conflict hidden in here somewhere.
The topic area has a lot of potential.
The Bad
“Is morally justified” is an ambiguous brightline standard. The three ways to interpret it:
Specific scope. Affirmative wins if they can prove that there is one example - even hypothetical - where conditions on aid can be justified. That standard is very easy for affirmatives to meet.
General scope. Affirmative wins if they can prove that imposing conditions is justified most (50% + 1) of the time. This is probably more literally correct but is incredibly difficult to measure, let alone meet. “Conditions” is just too broad. Unfortunately, most debates will probably unfold in this space.
Absolute scope. Affirmative wins if imposing conditions is always justified. Obviously, affirmative loses every time if that’s true. But the ambiguity in the resolution means there’s nothing stopping negatives from running Absolute Scope resolutional analyses - forcing everyone into a tedious debate with minimal educational value.
In short: there are three ways to interpret the resolution, and none of them work.
For advanced debaters, it’s best to make the advocacy more difficult (ex: “Requiring the end of human rights abuses …”) and make the brightline easier: “Can be justified.” That’s a clear specific standard that can produce an interesting debate. But even debaters with 3+ years of experience would struggle to debate it correctly. For novice/intermediate debaters, this kind of resolution should be avoided.
This problem utterly breaks the resolution, making it difficult to even evaluate what would have been its positive qualities. Anything good we might say about it, we’re really saying about better-worded variants. Interesting debates will only be possible with the active cooperation or theory ignorance of both sides, which means this resolution is not viable.
Verdict: 2/5. As a year-long high school debate resolution, this is a non-starter.
In the context of innovation, the proactionary principle ought to be valued above the precautionary principle.
The Good
This resolution is well-worded.
Stoa’s version was specific in a way that forces debaters to discuss a good conflict loaded with educational value. This one doesn’t - more on that in a moment - but it at least contains the possibility of an interesting conflict. In other words: if debaters want to have an interesting value round and cooperate with each other, they can.
The Bad
Proaction and precaution are fully compatible with each other and usually explicitly overlap. Suppose you lock your doors before going to sleep. You’re being proactive by taking action before anything happens for you to react to. You’re also being precautionary by defending yourself from intruders before any specific threat of intrusion exists.
The principles associated with these two things can conflict in the context of innovation, but not in a way that keeps a No Conflict resolutional objection from working.
Every aspect of this resolution is too broad. Since the scope is clearly general, debaters need to prove that the resolution is true in most instances. They can’t zoom in on the really juicy conflicts because those aren’t big enough to prove the principle.
It’s not that the topic can’t support robust debate and an interesting metagame. It technically can. But all of that will be eclipsed by the sheer, dizzying scale of the resolution. You’ll notice after a few tournaments that, no matter what the flows say, you’re repeating the same phrases over and over. “It’s dangerous!” “But it’s worth the risk!” “But it’s dangerous!” Whenever you try to focus on an interesting part of the resolution, your opponent will do their job and yank you back into the abstract.
Differentiating yourself won’t come down to improving your case or doing more research, it will come down to tiny optimizations in your delivery and cross-ex. That is fun and valuable, but it should come after the case writing and research and tough philosophical questions that a better resolution would require. In live rounds, you will almost never be surprised by your opponent.
Final verdict: 3/5. This is not a good resolution, but it is viable.
When in conflict, a corporation's responsibility to its shareholders ought to be valued above its responsibility to its stakeholders.
The Good
Nothing comes to mind.
The Bad
“When in conflict” is implied in all comparative resolutions and can only harm when it is explicitly stated. It was avoided for resolution 2, so the decision to put it into this one is baffling.
This is an extremely niche topic with low educational value.
The topic is so narrow that the metagame will calcify almost immediately. Summer sourcebook cases will stay generally relevant all the way to nationals; the only evolution will be in execution. There will be minimal reward for research.
This topic has a very high learning curve just to get to the point where you understand it. That makes life hard for novices and will lead to a lot of frustrating debates because you have to make one of two bad decisions in front of community judges:
Spend long chunks of your speech providing background explanation.
Skip explanation because you and your opponent are tired of it and fully understand each other.
Number 2 will happen more and more as the year goes on. A big determination of success will be the ability to hold back from the interesting advocacy debate and be disciplined enough to explain yourself from scratch over and over. That is not what you signed up for when you chose to debate.
Now let’s talk about the main problem with this resolution.
A stakeholder is someone who has a vested interest in the business. Employees, customers, and investors are all stakeholders.
A shareholder is someone who owns a piece of the business.
That means that shareholder is a kind of stakeholder. Comparative resolutions do not work when one of the subjects is a sub-set of the other. Examples:
Cats are better than mammals.
Mary’s responsibility to her eldest son David is greater than her responsibility to her children.
The conflict that the league seemed to be trying to set up was “non-shareholding stakeholders vs shareholders.” That’s more functional but still only enables a few basic case patterns on either side in a topic area with little to offer.
Verdict: 1/5. This resolution is incapable of producing a good round between debaters who have done 15+ minutes of research.
Final verdict: Do TP.
Whichever resolution wins, you should strongly consider switching to TP. Policy is guaranteed to have at least a good resolution and is likely to have an incredible one. Meanwhile, this is the worst set of LD resolutions NCFCA has offered since we started reviewing them. None of them can give you a good year of competition.
If you’re determined to vote for a resolution, pick number 2.
More reviews coming soon. Stay tuned.