Advanced Principles by Tin Puljić

[Music] okay hello everyone and welcome to this session on advanced principles my name is tin and i will be giving this session uh today so i the way i imagine this is it doesn't last longer than an hour maybe you know hour 15 tops uh so it doesn't become too tiring for everyone what i'm going to cover is first of all how to make a principal argument secondly how To weigh principles thirdly how to strategically utilize them and fourthly how do you deal with them so how do you respond to principles uh in terms of

questions uh i would like questions to be given during the lecture so of course i will ask at the end whether there are any questions or it pops into your mind during the lecture just immediately put it in the Chat or just dm me on zoom because i will be watching the chat and i will try to integrate it into the session immediately i think the best this is the best way because when you have a q a at the end just i think a lot of people's attention spans a dropper people have to go

and i think this is just a more dynamic way to immediately answer people's questions and just integrate it into what i'm talking about um that being said i would like to start So the first thing we have to discuss is how to make a principal argument how to make it well so there are a couple of parts there are a couple of steps that you need to follow in order for this to work well i'm going to go over each and every one of them and explain what i mean by this and try to give

examples as much as possible in order for this to be as clear as possible so the first thing that one needs to Keep in mind when making a principal argument and this is something that people very often forget and that people very often just do not do is that you need to have a theoretical definition of the principle before you start to argue why a certain principle is or is not being fulfilled in the motion so in other words what is the principle in question and how is it measured give a couple of examples so

if you are let's say debating about Progressive taxation and you want to make a principled argument that you think that progressive taxation is a fair distribution of wealth my first question is what is a fair distribution of wealth in general what type of wealth distribution should be considered fair and what are the criteria for any wealth distribution to be considered fair and only then can you argue why progressive taxation fulfills this secondly if you want to Argue that within the criminal justice system for example a decision is a just decision what is a just decision

or if you want to say that something fulfills the role of the criminal justice system what is the role of the criminal justice system so is it retribution is the rehabilitation to what extent is it one or the other and only then you can compare Uh only then you can compare whether or not something is the role of the justice system or not the role of the justice system i think another example just give a particular emotion is when you have the idea this house supports the use of eco-terrorism uh in order to combat climate

change whereby eco-terrorism would be sabotaging let's say nuclear plants or sabotaging For attacking individuals or for example ceos of certain corporations and you would want to argue for the principle of self-defense so this is a legitimate act of self-defense the first question is what are the criteria for something to be considered a legitimate attack of self-defense the criteria would probably be one it's proportional so if i you know if i'm attacked by someone and they have a knife it's proportional for me to hit Them or to try to disarm them if i disarm them and

they're lying on the floor and they're obviously unconscious it would be disproportional for me to then take that knife and you know plunge it into their heart because it already defended myself there is no need for additional action the second would probably be that there is no other way out so that there is no alternative in which You avoid harms so if i can in this case of eco-terrorism if there are other ways to fight climate change that would not incur harms upon property in people we should probably prioritize those and from government you would

then want to show but this is the only way that all lobbying has failed that you know all legislation has failed and this is the this is the only way the third one i think will probably be intent so whether or not your intent is Truly to defend yourself and defend others or you have malicious intent because in the justice system we take an intent into account you would want to prove that from the perception of the individuals committing these acts they feel like they have no other choice and they feel that the only way

to defend themselves and to defend others is to do this so they have no malicious intent therefore we consider this self-defense but in order to prove that Argument first to establish the criteria when considered illegitimate attack of self-defense or not this is needed as a metric of sorts because when you move to the second step which is the link of the principle and the motion so explaining why the motion fulfills or doesn't fulfill the principle you need to be able to measure against something so this motion fulfills the principle of self-defense Because it meets the

criteria for self-defense or if you want to claim you know democratic agency and you need to when you want to claim that people need to have a certain level of agency within their country this motion fulfills that principle because it brings us closer to achieving that criteria and so on and so forth so how does the motion fulfills or doesn't fulfill a principle comes after defining The principle and comes after defining the criteria by which we measure that principle the next step very obviously is that you want to explain the importance of the principle so

in other words why does it matter so much why do we care because you can run a principle and you can prove a principle well but if you cannot convince the judges that they should care about this principle they Should care about it more than they care about other arguments it's not likely to win in the debate i'm going to try to give you a couple of uh pieces of advice in terms of how you know some kind of tricks that you can use in order to make your principles sound better and sound more important

the first thing which is very useful is that it helps to connect your principles to broad ideas that everyone agrees with so to try to portray your principle as Being a self-evident thing a self-evident you know benefit that nobody can disagree with but to give an example what i very often like to do is i i like to equate the right to choice the right to free choice to the right to life and say that one is stent and onto the other the analysis i use behind it is to say the only way for people

to have a fulfilled and dignified life Is for them to be able to fulfill their preferences or at least to be able to try to fulfill their preferences so what defines a person's life as dignified or as a good life is incredibly subjective we all have our own definitions of the good life what makes our single life good or bad then depends on how well we are able to follow our subjective preferences if we are denied the ability to follow our subjective preferences then we are Denied the ability to achieve our definition of happiness therefore

deny the ability to pursue a dignified life therefore the right to free choice is equal to the right to life is so far as the ability to choose to follow our own preferences is what makes a dignified life in the first place to give an example of how this is used in a debate i very often like to use this in conjunction with the state power principle so the state power principle At least the way i like to do it is to say the following there are three reasons why there's a disproportionate amount of power

that the state has over individual citizens the first is that every single aspect of your life is determined by state policy and legislation so be an education be it health care welfare be it wage and labor policies the second is that the state has an overwhelming amount of coercive power To force you to do its bidding even if you do not want to do so so the state has the court system which can put you in prison the state has the police and the military which we can use actual firepower to enforce their decisions and

it's practically impossible for you as an individual citizen to resist the power of the state so not only does the state have the absolute control over policy it also gives you very few mechanisms to oppose The state at least violently and thirdly it's hard to avoid it's impossible to avoid being in a state you functioning cannot be stateless you can move between states but even so far as the world is made up of states you can never be stateless and even if you could be stateless you would not have human rights outside of a state

because you have human rights only to the extent to which the state provides them for you Therefore the only way for people to control their destiny and to control the material conditions of their existence is to control the state because if the state subsumes every element of a human life and the state controls your life to the fullest extent then the only way for you to take control of your life is to take control of the state and this is an argument you would use in debates about voting and democracy so in debates like This

house would give more votes to the poor or they sounds to give more votes to minorities or things like that and then here's how the right to life right to choice thing comes up if you're for example saying talking about voting or claiming for example that poor individuals need to have more votes because they are more disprivileged within democracy and everyone should have the right to control their destiny through the state Given that the state controls every single aspect of your life and therefore the only way for you to follow your preferences and to control

anything in your life is to control the state being able to have the right of choice in a democracy the right of choice of government the right of influence over who the government is is equal to the right to life because if you do not have the ability to choose Who governs you you have absolutely no ability to control your life therefore you cannot pursue your definition of a dignified life which means that you have lost the right to a dignified life therefore the right to choice within a country is identical to the right to

a dignified life the reason why this is important is because the right to a dignified life is something that everyone considers to be the absolute pinnacle of rights this is Something that every human being is accorded and every human being should have this respect and if you are able to equate let's say lower tier principles with higher tier principles but people are unlikely to disagree with your principles immediately become more persuasive i think just another addition to this is to be careful about how you name your principles so don't so instead of saying something Is

unfair say that something is a fundamental injustice or instead of saying that this denies people the ability to choose it denies them agency now this may seem like you know just rhetorical but this is something that makes arguments more persuasive subconsciously to judges and it is somewhat an ipl esl unbiased thing because if someone hears We're going to prove that this is unfair that kind of sounds you know not as serious as something being a injustice to human dignity or something like that and just given that people like rhetorics and persuasive rhetoric make people listen

more and debate judges are not you know impervious to this it just helps to use words and use phrasing that uh that actually sounds more persuasive and it sounds more powerful The second and i think very important piece of advice in terms of crafting a persuasive principle is the usage of analogies analogies help make the principle self-evident analogies meaning means finding an idea that seems common sense and everyone intuitively agrees with it and analogizing it with the principle that you are running Which can be used both offensively and defensively i'm going to give a couple

of examples the first one let's say that the debate is this house would allow members of religious communities to democratically elect their leaders nobody would probably disagree with the idea of democracy in general uh and the idea of people getting to choose their government and We can use the state power principle to prove this so let's go through the criteria why we think that people need to have power to choose in a democracy i already explained them so i'll be very short the first one is the state decides every aspect of your life this is

true and even more true for religious leaders because not only do they give you rules that you need to Follow in your everyday life so they interpret the bible or the quran or the talmud and they you know give you applications of this in real life you need to follow things that you need to fast or not eat particular things we need to pray a certain amount of times a day but they also control your afterlife because they are your guides to the afterlife and if you believe in the afterlife or your the afterlife is

as good as real so they Don't just control your earthly life they also control your other life the second criterion the state has coercive power uh to force you to do speeding the same is true of religious leaders because they being the ones with the largest amount of authority to interpret scripture can impose upon you the threat of religious domination which is to say that given That there are you know instruments like for example confession uh confession and you know catholicism and the priests can be dependents for example this is a way for them to

get you to do their bidding which is to say they can say if you don't do this by my religious authority to interpret scripture i say that you are threading down the path of sin so they have towards the power over you third criterion you cannot fundamentally Be status because you cannot escape the state if you believe in the afterlife and if you believe in god you can never escape god because god is only present and anonymous which means that real given that this is unescapable and there exists an afterlife you need to have the

right to choose who guide you to that after here's why this analogy works because what you can then say is If the other side agrees on these three criteria that people should have the right to choose within a state then they also have to agree that people should have the right to choose the religious leaders because the three criteria work even better for religious leaders and this forces the opposition to either disagree with both of these things and explain why actually they don't like democracy and they don't think people have the right to choose or

they have to Explain why your analogy is not analogous both of which give them additional work second example this is an offensive example and this is an example that we used uh in in a debate about cancel culture where uh the team that supported council culture on a principle which in essence talked about personal harm and the right to avoid personal heart so they said in so far certain individuals say statements or have types of behavior Which are offensive to other individuals these individuals have the right to retaliate against that offense by providing the measure

of cancer the analogy that we gave was the following if we were to imagine for example an lgbtq rights activists in an incredibly conservative religious community these this person's actions not only offend the surrounding community but insofar as they are Religious make the surrounding community or at least the very orthodox members of that community believe that they are in the presence of a truly sinful person a person whose behavior perhaps endangers the metaphysical faith of the entire community by the extension of the principle of the government they would have to support cancelling that kind of

person here is the thing nobody in the right mind would say we should cancel on lgbtq rights activists In in a conservative community but the consequence of their principle is exactly that which means that they either have to prove why they would not do this and put make their principle include make their principle inconsistent or they would or they would have to explain why they would cancel both which is not a particularly good thing to do in this kind of type of situation another Rebuttal that was good in that situation was to argue for proportionality

this is just in terms of remarkable principles what we argued is yes even if people do have the right to retaliate retaliation needs to be proportional here is why canceling someone and taking away their entire livelihood is not proportional to the harm that was done to you based on them you know making a tweet which is offensive or something like this and this ties into what i said earlier the Definition of the definition of the principle because they said people have the right to retaliate we said yes but there needs to be certain criteria for

this retaliation to be legitimate here is why you go beyond that criteria this is giving an example of what i've said earlier third analogy and i think this is you know maybe the the the most you know metaphysical one so the fat man analogy in the in the trolling problem it's Called the batman analogy as parasite which everyone knows the trolling problems so you find yourself in a situation where you are immaturely and the troll is currently on a track to kill five people but if you pull a lever you can knowingly decide to kill

one person instead of five would you do this or would you not and the argument that's usually used for pulling the lever and killing one person is the argument that says In both situations you are making a knowing decision to kill someone or not kill someone it's better to kill a smaller amount of people the fat man analogy then says okay let's say that you're a bystander on a bridge and you are observing the trolley problem and there is a fat man also on the bridge who you can push off the bridge to stop the

trolling and if if you push the fat man of the Bridge the troll is going to be stopped and neither the five people on the left or the one person right is going to be killed would you push the fat man as a bystander people have very uh very hard time defending this analogy because it seems unintuitive because the true only problem is a thought experiment and we all heard of it we're all invested in it but when an analogy takes the you out of the trolley Problem and says oh look you're just a guy

on a bridge and you can push another innocent guy onto a railroad track he seems horrible to everyone and it makes it hard for teams to argue to continue arguing for their argument so the thing is find something that everyone is going to agree with everyone is going to consider common sense and analogize it to the situation of course you need to explain why your analogy is analogous and secondly you need to strategically Utilize it in a speech what does this mean you need to explicitly say what the analogy does for the burden so in

the let's say for lgbtq rights activist example i gave you need to explicitly say in your speech this means that either the government needs to stand for counseling individuals who campaign for human rights just because This offends someone or in order to keep their principle consistent they would have to explain why this is not analogous and why their principle doesn't necessitate this but this needs to be said explicitly you need to give the implication of your analogy for the burden very ex very explicitly within within the round let's see there are questions in the chat

i will read out the question uh although It's visible for everyone question number one when going to principally defend democracy how can i know that democratic leadership doesn't have as much coercive power as other forms of political structures since it's vague to understand that there's any stark difference between political structure and coercive power even if you have freedom of expression in democracy it doesn't give justification for democracy Second a recent report on how satisfied this young generation was and the result was unfortunate that youth were dissatisfied so the status quo young veering against the off

against democracy how can you defend a democratic system on a principal round i think first of all the answer to the first part is comparative so obviously democratic systems can also be coercive and they are coercive to the extent which any State is necessarily is necessarily coercive course of institution or group of institutions um what does what does this mean this means that comparatively if your criteria is um if your criteria is how much people have the right to control their lives they have more of it in democracy than They do in the comparative system

and second the response would be to say that in situations where democracies are not as you know allowing of people's freedoms and rights as they should be this is solved by more democracy and not less democracy i think through the second thing of the young viewing of against democracy i i think the response to this is to say in order for the young to be able to express their preferences against Democracy and to see them implemented into the political system they require democracy in the first place because people can dislike democracy but in order for

them to be able to choose for themselves that they dislike democracy and in order for them to abolish democracy or you know vote in a party that doesn't like democracy without having to put their lives at risk through a violent revolution they first need democracy The democracy is prior to any kind of preference expression especially if people do abolish democracy and they you know implement a dictatorship they can also be dissatisfied with that dictatorship so if someone is arguing and saying but people are dissatisfied with democracy the answer can be but they can also be

dissatisfied with what comes after democracy for them to be able to change that they will need to have a democratic system they will need To have the ability to control and through this thing the second other question is what is the criteria for states policy to be justified versus coercive like making education mandatory or forcing us to follow laws i think this is largely the harm principle i think the justification here is that the amount of restriction imposed by the state should be proportional to the amount of benefit Received for the harm prevented i.e this

the stages if the state's restrictions are justified insofar as they provide more benefit than they do harm and this is i think the usage of utilitarianism as a principle because all state decisions are coercive there is no law that's not coercive so the question then is how do we determine whether laws are acceptable or Unacceptable we determine them based on the outcomes of these laws whether we think that the conversion is something we're willing to accept for the outcome of that law uh next question is how can use analogies or heuristics when we're running a

non-rhetorical principle example principle of specialization in free trade is a theoretical principle that fulfills the criteria of a principle seeking to maximize Consumption but it's perhaps not as intuitive as democracy in moral reciprocity i mean i think it depends on the type of principle you are running i think for example if you're running you know generally a principle of free trade i think what you can say is in general there is nothing that people inherently owe to other individuals so the fact that i possess a skill does not necessarily mean that i owe it to

Society to provide that skill to them so for example i can be skilled at mathematics it would be nice of me to teach people mathematics for free there is no moral obligation for me to do that in surprise that is true people should be able to use and market their skills through free trade and to allow them and to be allowed to you know set a price for their skills and other people should be allowed to decide whether or not they want to buy these skills or they want to Buy these products for maybe an

analogy i would use in general but i think just very much depends on very much depends on how much and how much you know uh the principle is specific and then what in what kind of motion you're running the principle and so on and so forth uh okay moving onwards uh i think however what needs to be kept in mind is that analogies are not enough as not everyone will always have your Intuitions so you need analytical reasoning as well you need to have theoretical analysis theoretical reasoning as to why something should be true and

i think very often this can be done in you know common-sense ways so for example if you're arguing for agency what you can say is look uh given that there is no objectively you Know good path uh good path to happiness so there is no universal definition of happiness people are the ones who are best able to determine what happiness is for themselves within it in so far as happiness what makes people's lives lives worthwhile people should have agency to make their lives happen you know quite that quite a common state if they don't have

agency they are unable to pursue Happiness and stuff like this i think this is also just a generally good way to weigh off utility versus agency because there is no objective way to determine utility so utility is a subjective calculation of preferences which means that what constitutes utility for an individual person is a consequence of a uh of the collection of their experiences of their desires and of Their emotions every individual has a different set of those which means that when that there is no objective way to determine utility this therefore means that the only

thing we can refer to is allowing individuals to choose for themselves what utility means to them this means that agencies prior to utility because in order for utility to exist every individual person first needs to have agency to determine what utility is for Themselves because because there is no objective way to determine it but secondly uh this this therefore means that utility doesn't exist if agency is not allowed so we should therefore prioritize agency over utility i think it's a good example good intuition for this is to say we could assume that uh saying the

word dog would give would uh give most people positive utility because you know dogs Make people happy but if you know somebody's dog has recently passed away then they can be very sad if someone says the word dog in their presence so we can never assume what's going to bring people ability only people can do this for themselves therefore agency is coming prior for it so in general do not spend too much time on analogies because if your analogy takes four minutes to explain then it's probably very unclear and convoluted and Secondly as i said

not everyone will have your intuitions you need to have theoretical reasoning it generally just you know comes down to answering a common question of why this matters if you're having trouble answering the question of why something matters i think that's a good way to bypass this and to come up with you know intuitive reasons why principle is important is to imagine a world without a certain Principle and then try to see why that world is worse so if we were to have a world without freedom of choice why is that a worse world if we

were to have a world where our agency was reduced in a particular way why would that be a worse world and then from this you can extract why conversely it would be a better world if we were not if we were not denied that agency and if we were not denied a certain amount of freedom of choice so and this Is similar to the general technique of if you don't know how to argue for something then you're gonna and so for example if you you know you're opening government on a motion and you and only

opening opposition seems intuitive to you so don't know what the og case is but always start by doing at least rebuttal to the okay that you know this is similar to this imagine an alternative world where this principle doesn't exist three Different reasons why it's bad there is a question does a principle necessarily need a theoretical framework or is it possible to just base it all on tangible impacts in order to prove why it's important um i mean you can run a principle with utilitarian elements the thing is that then very often the risk behind

this is that it's then tied to practical impacts so if you're running so if you're basing your Principle on tangible impacts you also need to prove that these events are true because if the impacts are not true then also your principle doesn't hold true because based on what you asked for the principle to hold true you need to prove certain impacts and i think this disarms one of the strongest strengths that prince principles have which they're independent of practical outcomes and this is what i'm going to talk about in weighing uh Principle which is also

the last step we need to weigh the principle just before that i'm going to take 20 seconds i need to uh relatively urgently respond to a message i'm sorry cool before moving on to weighing question is how do you manage which principles to prioritize and argue them in a way that responds to your opponent's case this is a question that doesn't have a clear answer uh insofar as there are Different debates and different principles that you can run i think just a template question that you can ask yourself is for any argument so not just

a principle is if the judge if i explain this and the judge believes this so let's say the judge buys this argument 100 how does this argument help me win which means that if the answer to the question is even if we prove this principle it doesn't bring us you know That close to victory maybe there's another principle we should run or maybe we shouldn't run principles in this motion so maybe the question of if the judge completely believes this how close does it bring me to victory and why does it help me when could

be a question which in prep could help you determine what or what not to run question is beyond utilitarianism and consequentialism if we are using the analysis of how the world would be worse Without the principle aren't we just using consequentialist logic to way principles how is that independent outcomes or impacts uh i'm not sure it's fully consequentialist i mean this is similar to the to the accounting categorical principle so the categorical principle provided by manual count is fully deontological so it so it doesn't rely on outcomes it's just certain things are just unjust the

way he uses uh the mechanism he uses to Check whether things are unjust is to say imagine if all people were to do something how would the world look because the reason why we value principles and why we consider principles to be values the reason why we use the word value is because we think they add some kind of value to our lives i.e the introduction of a certain principle in the end provides value Which means that to some extent we need to argue about the importance of the existence of a principle within within our

lives uh i mean i think you could make the case that all principles are consequentialist in the end in so far as the end goal of every principle and having states protect them is to bring you know more dignity and happiness to people and if you consider dignity and happiness to Be you know consequentialist things and maybe you can make the case all principles are consequentialists but i think just using the idea of uh checking whether your principle is actually a good principle or not imagine alternative world still works because you need to find a

reason why for example freedom of speech is important and this is tied to the idea that freedom of speech brings some value to people and brings some benefits to Individuals so therefore i think this still works i am going to talk about this a little bit more in in weighing principles and what specifically i mean being independent of outcomes for impacts uh okay in terms of weighing principles there are a there are a number there are a number of ways to weigh principles the first one is weighing on independence for Practical outcomes and i think

this is uh also then the answer to the question that was asked someone what does this mean this means that regardless of who wins the practical clash the principle will remain true let's give an example of this if we take the motion this house would give more votes to the poor opening government will let's say argue that this means that the poor have more Leverage over the state and therefore that the state is going to care more about poor people opening opposition will then say uh here are a number of reasons why the poor actually

are not going to vote because they're too apathetic they distrust the political system opening government is not going to get their impacts what closing government can win on is saying we think there's an obligation of the State to provide poor people with the chance to have more recourse towards the state and then you can argue on things like the poor are the most privileged within the state the poor are the people who the state has failed the most in a state everyone should have equal recourse towards that state the poor currently have less of it

because even though they have one vote like everyone else they Have less money they have less political capital we need to equalize the playing field all these are reasons why the state owes it to poor people to give them this chance regardless of whether they are going to use this chance even if they don't go to the ballot box if they choose not to go to the ballot box and opening government has no impacts closing government still proves that the state has an obligation to provide this to them Even if they don't use it and

i think even in this case so this is fully independent of the practical clash so regardless of whether og proves that poor people will vote or all prove that they won't vote closing government has independently of this proven that insofar as the motion is normative and says this house would give her this house you know believes that the poor should have more votes closing government has proven that This is something that should be done therefore successfully proposed emotion without actually arguing for an impact now to connect this to the idea of using an alternative world

as a checking mechanism i can still say let's imagine a world where a state does not give poor individuals the chance to have equal recourse to everyone else this is a worse world this is a worse world because a certain amount of people Who are already the most disprivileged do not have recourse to control their lives and a world where a certain amount of people or also probably the most unhappy people in society are not able to change their circumstances and are forced to you know live in poverty because they can't control the state is

a worse world this doesn't change the fact that the argument i've made is independent of practical outcomes in that debate because i've made an Argument which proves an obligation regardless of whether oh g or o o win the practical clash but i can still use the alternative world mechanism to say a world where the state doesn't do this is a worse world because we believe in the value of people being able to control the material conditions of their existence so philosophically you could make a case that this is utilitarian in the end because why should

they control their Existence because this leads to happiness happiness is utility fine but this doesn't change the fact that within the scope of the debate the argument i've made is still independent of the practical clash so this is how i think the independence of practical outcomes can co-exist with the idea of using counterfactuals as checking mechanism because you just need to prove that the Principle is independent of teams winning the practical passion in the rounds this is the way in which you weigh the principle and i think when you do this you can use emotion

phrasing to your advantage because most emotions are phrased normative so this house believes that we should do something or this helps support something it sounds prefer something This means these emotions do not inherently require you to prove utility they require you to prove that there is something that should be done something should be done regardless of whether or not it provides utility or at least you can prove that this is true there are things which we can claim that humans should do even if the overall sum of utility is not going to be a positive

sum of Utility so for example we can say that people should not assault other individuals even if there is theoretically no conceivable harm so the analogy that was used and i think this is this was uh ashish kumar's analogy which is very good which is uh technically let's imagine a case of harmless assault in what way so there was an assault or Whatever time and the victim doesn't remember the assault so they have no psychological uh memory or psychological trauma or impact there was no damage to the victim somehow the body was not damaged in

any way so the victim has no negative utility from that assault we can still say that people should not assault other people Even if we can imagine a case where technically there is no negative utility so saying that some something should happen doesn't imply utility you can argue for it but it's not implied in the motion so what you can do is you can explicitly say in debates and this is what i like to do this emotion is phrased as a normative claim in so far as it's phrased as a normative claim the burden of

things in this debate is to prove That this is normatively acceptable and therefore by proving the principle we have already proven our burden because we have proven the normative logic this is the way that you can use motion phrasing to your advantage which i think goes well in conjunction with weighing on independence for practical outcomes which is to say when you weigh independently practical outcomes what you're going to say is panel regardless of who wins the Practical clash our principle remains true regardless which is why we are let's say if you're from closing you're we're

independent of the opening half therefore we are logically prior to anything that the opening happens arguably the second uh mechanism to weigh principles is weighing on universality uh what does this mean This means that principles are true in all instances whereas practical arguments are always only true in a certain even high percentage for example if og helps 80 percent of people through a particular motion but cg shows that there is an obligation towards 100 of people to implement that motion then cg wins on universality because cg shows that in 100 of cases a principle applies

whereas practical Impacts will always happen only in a percentage of cases any motion whatever you know whatever emotion it is is not going to help everyone and it's going to harm someone so there is never a 100 practical benefit a well-proven principle is a universal principle it applies in all cases and this is again a good good example is again the voting for the poor thing which uh more votes for the poor Even if we don't help all of the poor even if we don't help most of them it is true that the state has

an obligation towards every single poor person whether or not they are held which means that the principle is true in more cases than the practical is true which means that on quantity of cases to which the argument applies the principle applies to a larger amount of cases and it's truer in more cases and this is the way in which you can weigh it all and i Think in this case you also can win an engagement because let's if if you take the example of og helps 80 percent of people but cg proves we have obligation

towards 100 of people even if they're not helped uh cg can win on engagement with oh as well because cg proves that we should do this even if not all people are helped which is likely to be part of the opposition case so weighing on universality is something that is also a Good way to to way of principles so weighing on independence and weighing on universality i think are the two most common ways to weigh principles and the ones that most often work what you need to keep in mind is that running a principle is

a high burden there is biased words consequentialism in general because the number one i will say this explicitly there are just a number of people who don't understand principles Secondly it's easier to judge in a round on the same metric that all teams run on because most teams most of the time will run consequentialist cases and then you have one team who runs the principle and it's hard you know to compare a principle to three consequentialist cases and adjust the easy way out to judge based on the common matrix in the round which is consequentialism

and principles Are hard to weigh against practical claims for judges just as they are for speakers which means that you need to be aware that you should run in principle if you are sure about it not just because it's fun so this is not an argument against running principles but this is just to say be careful when you are running principles and be sure that you know how to explain a principle well just keep in Mind that the bias against principles exist and if you need to be relatively sure of what you're running that it's

going to be run well when you decide to run uh another thing to remember is the principles very often have to be weighed against each other so let's say one team runs one principle the other team runs another so how do you weigh principles against each other i think the easiest way to do This is through contingency or theological priority which is to say but one principle is a prerequisite for another principle uh i think a good example of this is uh so my idea of uh the right to choice in the right to life

is actually that so the right to choice is actually prerequisite for the right to like i think another good example is security versus freedom where for example if you have debates About uh you know restrictions being imposed on people uh to to you know prevent certain harms for example if you have you know we're trying to prevent terrorism and then when states implement you know let's say cctv surveillance and this to some extent harms people's freedom to privacy then you can in a way you can do is here's why security is more important first of

all because if you Are dead you cannot exercise any other right so security as a principle comes before any other principle because you first need to be alive to exercise other principles secondly because security or at least the feeling of security is a prerequisite for me to actually feel free so for example if i think that when i go onto the street a terrorist is going to attack me I am not free to go onto the street i mean objectively i am there is no law or physical force stopping me but if i believe that

i'm going to be attacked on the street i will not feel free to go out on the street because i will think i'm not going to get attacked i'm going to be scared if i go out on the street or i will lock myself into my house so even though i objectively have freedom i functionally don't have freedom because i don't feel Free and therefore i behave in an unfree manner which means that as a prerequisite for me to be free i have to believe that i am safe so regardless of whether or not there

actually is a terrorist waiting to kill me if i think that he's there i'm going to behave accordingly so in order for the principle of freedom to be fulfilled we first need to prioritize security because only when people are safe can they fully exercise freedom so Most often you're going to weigh on principles being contingent on one another or prior to one another and just keep in mind in general that principles will have to be weighed against each other especially in fully principled debate such debates exist and you will have to weigh principles against moving

on to the part of how to strategically utilize principles and how to defend your principles first of all just combine them with Practical arguments uh there are emotions that are exclusively principled but they are relatively rare and running an exclusively principled case is very often a very risky strategy for the reasons i've explained earlier in terms of consequentialist bias but also because if you choose to run a fully principled case in a motion that has a practical element as well you will have to do a lot of washing out of the Practical improvement that the

practical is uncomparative and very often this is hard because it's hard to prove that something is fully uncompared so you can show it it's marginally comparative but most things are comparative to some extent so there's a high burden in running an exclusively principal case so you want to combine them with practical arguments and this is a strategically best thing to do because ideally you want multiple avenues for Victory because if you run a principle argument and a practical argument you can say okay our principal is independent of the practical and has already won this debate

but even if you don't buy this panel we will also win the practical clash so even if they don't buy your first attempt at victory you have a second independent attempt at victory which they can still buy so in any debate then this is not Not just true principle arguments it's true of case building techniques and case building strategy in general you want to have different avenues for victory which are not dependent on one another so if you have one argument which the judge doesn't buy you want to have a second argument which is independent

of the first one which they can still buy and still make you win so combine them second thing is you will want to Explicitly call out principal biases so you will want to say things like i know this sounds abstract and metaphysical but i've given you weighing and proof why this wins over practical arguments we hope that the principal is going to be weighed fairly within this debate so call out implicit biases and judges tell them we know that this is an abstract argument but utility is not the only thing that's worth in debates Other

teams need to engage with our principal and if they don't we win so call this out explicitly call out other teams on engaging and call out the judges for weighing this because nobody wants to be explicitly biased i don't think anyone you know explicitly says i hate principles and i will now cross out the principle on my my flowchart but they are implicitly biased against principles so if you call out these implicit biases you Bring it to the judge's consciousness that they may be biased and nobody wants to think of themselves as biased but also

they know that they have a panel and if a team in the round has expressed a concern that there may be an anti-principle bias the judge will know that their panelists will also be wary of this and they don't want their panelists to give them bad feedback so this is uh something that you can do and this is not just true of principle Bias you can do this for esl bias for sexist bias all of these things thirdly i would just advise against running principles in active motions and even though the judge manual says that

you can run principal arguments in active motions the judge manual also adds that in order to run a principal argument in an active motion you need to prove why it is in the interest or the incentive of the actor to fulfill a principle this is necessarily not a Principled argument because you are saying because the actor believes in this principle they would get utility or happiness or fulfillment or moral joy for following a principle so you are arguing that it is in the utilitarian benefit of the actor to follow a principle because they believe in

that principles you're not saying this is a principle obligation or this is a principle which holds true you are saying an actor believes in something Therefore from their perspective it's good to follow a principle which means therefore that this is not a principled argument so i would advise instead of instead of running principle arguments in after motions just if you want to say an actor has a moral compass they should follow this because it's going to bring them happiness you can run it but don't frame it as a principle because i don't think you actually

can run a prince or an Actor again question in the chat what if all other three teams have made practical arguments in a ceo you make a principle case is it a strategy to avoid or what can be done to still with i mean that depends on the debate and how well they run the practical it's possible to win so if you're able to show that most of the practical arguments are marginally comparative and then prove that your principle Is actually true you can win if you weigh very well on the examples i gave you

on independence for practical outcomes and universality you can win you can also just run the principle and something practical and you can win but this depends on the debate at hand and this depends on how well other teams are running their arguments and how well you can run your principle this is just a very you know context specific question that i'm not sure i can answer uh i can Answer very specifically um so in terms of defending principles i think there are three things i would want to say first of all you can you have

to remind yourself that principles are seen as binary so they're other either proven or they are unproven what does this mean this means that There needs to be a response to the to the principle from the other teams first of all call out other teams if they are not responding to your principle but secondly you need to respond to challenges to your principle because the strength of principle argument is which is that they are either universally true or untrue which you can use in a way it's also the weakness of principle arguments which means that

they are Either proven or they are unproven so if there is a challenge to your principle you definitely need to respond to it secondly people will often fail to respond or they will fail to respond fully they will try to straw man your principle point out those traumas and thirdly remember specificity because very often the way people are going to attack your principles is they're going to say but why this principle in Particular or why is this motion the particular way to fulfill a principle so remember preemptively that you need to explain why emotion is

the unique or if not unique then at least the best way to fulfill a particular principle a good example this is the i think it's the test world's quarter final where there was the idea of uh creating an african-american state in the united states of america And both seo and finale run this case from og and they argued for specificity preemptively so they say this particular policy of giving them a state is necessary because this is the only way to have proportional reparations because african americans were depatriated they were taken away from their countries so

their homeland was taken away from them the only proportional reparation is for us to give them a homeland or a country so preemptively argue for Specificity and this is true of arguments in general so not just for principles you need to prove why emotion is a unique or if not a unique then at least the best way to fulfill a particular principle or to solve a particular problem if you're arguing for a practical argument so unique or if not unique then at least the best because otherwise there is a very very easy way for other

teams to just come and say yeah sure but there are Other ways to do this which are just better so keep this in mind in terms of dealing with principles in ie how to attack principles the first thing is you can try to portray principles as being contingent on practicalities i.e practicalities being just logically prior for a principle to work so this is the idea of let's say a government argues for agency and then you just say yeah sure but for agency to Be fulfilled there need to be these three practical impacts which first need

to happen which means that their case is contingent on the practical so again using the example of this house would give the poor more votes og runs a principle of this is going to increase agency for the poor you can say this is not a principle because in order for this to actually increase agency for the poor you need the poor to vote so you first need to Prove that they're going to go to the ballot box for this to bring more agency with that very often you can call out principles of being contingent on

practicalities or actually being in practical arguments and this is a way to weigh against principles as well for example if you are closing and you're opening runs of principle if you can show that for the principle to be true there first need to be some practical mechanisms which are Proven you can weigh by saying we are actually the ones who provide the analysis to why the principle is true making it contingent on the practical and we are the ones who provided those practicalities the second thing is you can win principal clashes by using practicalities for

example you can portray utility as being a principal value because utilitarianism in a way is also a principle so what you Can say for example is if all preferences are subjected and therefore utility matters insofar as it enables people to fulfill those preferences and also we should defer therefore to people subjective definitions of pain and pleasure what we are actually doing is we are arguing for utility we are arguing for the largest amount of people to be able to access the largest amount of utility Another another good thing to say another good logic here is

say the following given that there is no way for us to measure pleasure and pain objectively and this is i think the example when i said ah when i say dogs some people will be happy some people will be unhappy the only thing we can defer to is pain and pleasure and their maximization or minimization because this is all that People experience so all experiences that people have can be subsumed under pleasure and pain we cannot make a calculus in terms of the value of two different moral actors so each person is an equally valuable

moral actor so their pain and pleasure is equally valuable given we cannot objectively measure pain and pleasure the only thing we can refer to is just maximizing the largest amount of pleasure for the largest amount of Individuals i.e you can turn the argument off the argument of agency which is to say people's preferences are subjective therefore we prioritize agency over utility you can turn that argument on its head and say that the kind that the preferences are subjective is actually an argument for utility to give you an example in the cambridge iv quarter final in

uh 2018 there was the motion of this house would rather see uh 100 innocent men go to jail than one guilty person walk free the argument for the argument for utilitarianism in this debate is to say given that we cannot make a utility uh you know moral calculus between two moral actors there is no way to determine that one human being is more Valuable than another human being we should prioritize the side where a smaller amount of innocent people are heard so you have one innocent man going to jail and a hundred guilty people walking

free we can agree that this one innocent guy should not go to jail but we can also agree that we should not put people at risk of criminals walking the streets given that we cannot make us objective calculus of Which human being as a moral actor is more valuable we should prioritize the side which saves the largest amount of moral actors and therefore because we cannot have objective definitions of value because every person is a subjective and equally valuable moral actor we should defer to saving the largest amount of subjective agencies because this is the

only thing that we can actually defer to lacking any other Kind of objective criteria thirdly it's very important to keep in mind to disarm people's analogies uh so for example if they use the analogy of the harmless assault that i mentioned earlier you can say sure the analogy works as a thought experiment but there is no such thing as a harmless assault the fact that i can you know strain my mind to imagine this as a thought experiment doesn't mean this can actually happen we Determine principles and values based on real life circumstances you cannot

base a principle on an analogy which is never going to happen in the real world so keep in mind analogies can be flawed and lastly keep an eye out for one lack of importance analysis people not explaining why their principle is important and secondly for lack of weighing because people will very often fail to weigh their principles and you Need to point this out in your speeches so this is also a good way to deal with principles there are there are questions uh in the chat so the first one is in the four votes debate

the earlier principle you mentioned from cg was the publication exists why is agency fuji then depending on people going to ballot boxes i mean people could have chosen not to exercise the agency but that doesn't mean they don't have it so all doesn't really defeat og's principles uh Depends on how old you make the principles if og makes the principle as obligation of the state to provide for people with agency then no o doesn't be that argument if og makes the argument has this is going to give poor people more agency and this agency is

important because they will then be able to control the state this would be a principle that's contagious in the practical because the Second part the conclusion is they would then be able to control the statement if they don't exercise that control then the reason why the agency is important so oj says it's important for them to be able to control the state if they don't exercise it then the reason why oj said it's important is not proven without the practical and all could defeat the principle so depending on how well the principle is proven it's

either beaten or unbeaten i Purposefully made the worst version of that argument to show an example of an argument where teams actually include practical contingency in the principle the second question is if we say everyone is an equal moral actor why does weighing on vulnerability work i think in fact the way when everyone is an equal moral actor actually helps the the idea of vulnerability because we say Everyone equally deserves a certain level of human rights and a certain level of happiness needs a level of thinking because if we believe that everyone is an equal

moral actor then everyone is equally entitled to certain things that we call human rights if there are groups which are inherently more vulnerable and we are not helping them then we are preventing them from claiming their status as equal moral actors because Equal moral actors presume that everyone should have equal standing in terms of rights being provided to them the most vulnerable groups are those to whom rights are being provided the least providing them with those rights fulfills the idea of everyone being an equal moral actor because we are ensuring that we are equalizing them

to other individuals by providing them with more privilege and more rights therefore enabling them to be equal in terms of Rights and provisions of those rights to other people lastly i just want to uh i just want to keep point out a couple of ways in which you can improve on doing your principles i think first thing is just watching debates and watching them actively in terms of so when you see people running your principal argument write it down if they are using examples or thought experiments that you don't know of google those thought experiments

and Then read a little bit about them what the logic is behind it if you don't understand certain terms they use because they use complex terminology google that terminology and what it means when you write down those arguments analyze them what would you add to the argument what would you remove from the arguments you can tailor the arguments to your own preferences then watch the next speech see how the other speaker Rebutted the principle analyze this why was the rebuttal to the principle good or not good would you have roboted it differently then then towards

the next feature analyze the defense of the principle and write all of these things down and keep all of your notes in one place because you're allowed to have written material in debates if you have a lot of notes of debates that you've watched and principles that you've written down and Attacks and defenses of those principles and then your comments on this you can easily access it in prep time or during debates secondly you can you can access a lot of resources that tackle principles and tackle philosophy and all of these things so there are

things like stanford encyclopedia of philosophy which just deals with a lot of these things very well they have explanations of the vast Majority of you know uh philosophical concepts and stuff like this there are youtube channels like crash course philosophy which explain things in your very simple terms there are a bunch of debate workshops just like this one where people explain how to debate principles or how to debate particular principles there are a lot of resources you can access what's important is again to take notes and again to keep all of those notes in one

place because you Want to have a resource base that you can easily draw on during prep time and during debates i think this is true not just for principal arguments but in general and lastly you want to ask judges for targeted feedback so if you're running a principle ask them for the principle in particular how could that have done the principle better how could i have made the principal win particularly if you know judges who are very good at principal arguments and i Mean you will know this by watching the videos you will know who

does principal as well so for example one of the things that i know that does principles very well currently some of the best in europe is this is his state so this is stephen hamill and jackson so if they are judging you for example you can ask them how to improve on your principles and all these things and then Again keep notes from that feedback and you know reflect on these notes and go through this this is going to help you improve uh okay so that's largely it for for me for this lecture i hope

it was helpful to everyone i'll just give like 30 seconds if there are any questions that were not asked during the session uh hello uh i do really have a question uh can i ask it Yeah um is it really okay to like challenge the utilitarianism or likely to um make your pr or if since you have said that it's a really hard word or really high burden for principles so can you can i just make my principle argumentation a linchpin for the practical arguments or the utilitarianism that have been mentioned from the other houses

specifically if You're in closing and you're trying to compare like outweigh your opening yeah i mean you can so the only thing is that whenever you're trying to connect the principle to the practical you're also losing the strength of the principle and being independent of the practical but of course that you can make an argument which intertwines practical elements with principal Elements the only thing is be wary of what you're gaining and what you're losing by doing that but this is possible i think the best avenue to victory is as i said to combine principle

and practical be like okay here is the first independent practical benefit we do then we give a second independent practical benefit and thirdly we also give a moral reason why we win i think this is probably the safest way to go about it Um i just uh i know i just asked that question because if your opening happy is really good and taken down all the taken out all the practical arguments and you're left with just principles just like on that scenario like my question was for i mean the best way to win with the

principle is to try to one wash out a lot of the practicalities To explain why a lot of them is either on not fully proven by both teams on top half or why it's likely to end up being awash that not much is going to change and then run the principle and secondly to go very hard on weighing the principle in any way that you can imagine whether it's in universality or independence or whatever so first you would have to probably spend a lot of time washing out the practicalities and then secondly Would have to

weigh the principle really hard against against the top half teams because if as you said opening government took out all of the practical and then you try to make the principle the linchpin for the practical it runs the risk of ending up contingent on that same practicality which og already ran so if you have no practical arguments and only the principle the best thing to do is just go hail mary like full heart On the principle try to wash out the practical as much as possible and to weigh the principal as hard as possible just

the last question like i've heard from people that washing out your opening might lead to knife paint so how do you avoid like the subtle fine line difference it's largely a question of phrasing so you cannot say our opening is wrong when they say this what you can say is their idea is good and we agree that They have some marginal impact we don't think the impact is particularly large what you can say is opening government makes a good case but opening opposition has a good as a good complaint to that case they raise a

good question and then it's either unclear who wins the top half or opening government doesn't respond to opening opposition so it's unclear whether opening government proves their case so what you cannot do Is you cannot disagree with the opening government case you can say that they did not prove their case well so you can attack the amount of proof and the quality of proof that they've given so long as you don't contradict the idea of the case i'm just going to give it like 15 or 20 more seconds to see if anyone else does anything

to ask question can principles also exist independent of existing frames in this Debate or do they necessarily need to conform or challenge these frames they can't exist independently the thing is if you run a principle which is outside of the frame of a particular debate you need to explain why the principle is more important than that frame i.e why the debate should not be judged within that frame but rather based on your principle but obviously they can exist independently uh hi i had a question so in one of the Debates that or maybe it was

as far that we were doing but this team what they tried to do was they tried to run like practical arguments in terms of like corruption it's bad blah blah blah but like they premise their each of their arguments on an underlying principle that they didn't really pick up on for example corruption is theft right um this was like evident in this particular Debate but like how do we recognize if some other team is doing it or how do we do it effectively ourselves in terms of just premising the practical with the principle i mean

in terms of noticing what other teams are doing is just you know listening very attentively teams will very often as you said do this in a very vague or simplistic terms you're just saying corruption step For taxation is that whatever if this is done simplistically if this is not well explained you should call them out in the lack of explanation in terms of how you can do this well i think this is just a question of you know following the steps that they've given you in terms of crafting a good principle because i think the

broad question of how can we do a principle argument well or how we can You know combine principle and practical arguments well it's just a question of how well do you run an argument in a particular motion i think in terms of following the templates of how to make a good principle and how to weigh a principle well it's very good that you've got it from this workshop and as you can also find in other workshops as well there are a lot of good workshops out there should be something that could help you over Time

and then you can ask the judges for feedback and see if you have done that successfully