SS+Deontology+good+FL


 * 1) **Violating rights in the name of survival causes social paralysis and destroys the value to life.**
 * Callahan,** **institute** **of** **Society** **and Ethics, 1973** (Daniel, “The Tyranny of Survival”, p. 91-3)

The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. __In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life.__ The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. __During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld__ by the Supreme Court __in //Korematsu//__ //v. United States// (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. __The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of__ __South Africa__ __imposes a ruthless //apartheid//, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has see__n one of the greatest of the many __absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them.__ But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in //Beyond Freedom and Dignity// for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in //Chance and Necessity//, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. __In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from__ marrying and __bearing children__. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." __There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress.__ It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. __Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the__ father__land to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies.__ But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny __survival__ as value __is that it is capable__, if not treated sanely, __of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing.__ We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, __if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival.__ It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.

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 * 1) **We must act as our own moral agents – we are only responsible for taking our own moral actions and not for those of intervening actors.**
 * Gewirth, prof. of philosophy at the** **University** **of** **Chicago****, 1982** (Alan, “Human Rights: essays on justification and applications”, p. 229)

__The required supplement is provided by the principle of intervening action. According to this principle, when there is a casual connection between some person A’s performing some action (or inaction) X and some other person C’s incurring a certain harm Z, A’s moral responsibility for Z is removed if, between X and Z, there intervenes some other action Y of some person B who knows the relevant circumstances of his action and who intends to produce Z or who produces Z through recklessness__. The reason for this removal is that B’s intervening action Y is more direct of proximate cause of Z and, unlike A’s action (or inaction), Y is the sufficient condition of Z as it actually occurs. An example of this principle may help to show its connection with the absolutist thesis. __Martin Luther King Jr. was repeatedly told that because he led demonstrations in support of civil rights, he was morally responsible for the disorders, riots, and deaths that ensued and that were shaking the American Republic to its foundations. By the principle of intervening action, however, it was King’s opponents who were responsible because their intervention operated as the sufficient conditions of the riots and injuries__. King might also have replied that __the Republic would not be worth saving if the price that had to be paid was the violation of the civil rights of black Americans. As for the rights of the other Americans to peace and order, the reply would be that these rights cannot justifiably be secured at the price of the rights of blacks.__


 * 1) **We must act morally even until the point of death.**
 * Watson, prof. of philosophy at** **Washington** **University****, 1977** (“World Hunger and Moral Obligation”, p. 118-9)

One may even have to sacrifice one’s life or one’s nation to be moral in situations where practical behavior would preserve it. For example, if a prisoner of war undergoing torture is to be a (perhaps dead) patriot even when reason tells him that collaboration will hurt no one, he remains silent. Similarly, if one is to be moral, one distributes available food in equal shares even if everyone dies. That an action is necessary to save one’s life is no excuse for behaving unpatriotically or immorally if one wishes to be a patriot or moral. No principle of morality absolves one of behaving immorally simply to save one’s life or nation. There is a strict analogy here between adhering to moral principles for the sake of being moral, and adhering to Christian principles for the sake of being Christian. The moral world contains pits and lions, but one looks always to the highest light. The ultimate test always harks back to the highest principle – recant or die. The ultimate test always harks back to the highest principle – recant or die – and it is pathetic to profess morality if one quits when the going gets rough.

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 * 1) **Our impacts are systemic and thus guaranteed while theirs are only speculation – this alone is a reason to vote aff.**
 * Machan, prof. emeritus of philosophy at** **Auburn** **University****, 2003** (Tibor, “Passion for Liberty”)

All in all, then, I support the principled or rights-based ap­proach. In normal contexts, honesty is the best policy, even if at times it does not achieve the desired good results; so is respect for every individual's rights to life, liberty, and property. All in all, this is what will ensure the best consequences—in the long run and as a rule. Therefore, one need not be very concerned about the most recent estimate of the consequences of banning or not banning guns, breaking up or not breaking up Microsoft, or any other public policy, for that matter. It is enough to know that violating the rights of individuals to bear arms is a bad idea, and that history and analysis support our understanding of principle. To violate rights has always produced greater damage than good, so let's not do it, even when we are terri­bly tempted to do so, Let's not do it precisely because to do so would violate the fundamental requirements of human na­ture. It is those requirements that should be our guide, not some recent empirical data that have no staying power (ac­cording to their very own theoretical terms). Finally, you will ask, isn't this being dogmatic? Haven't we learned not to bank too much on what we've learned so far, when we also know that learning can always be improved, mod­ified, even revised? Isn't progress in the sciences and technology proof that past knowledge always gets overthrown a bit later? As in science and engineering, so in morality and politics: We must go with what we know but be open to change— provided that the change is warranted. Simply because some additional gun controls or regulations might save lives (some lives, perhaps at the expense of other lives) and simply because breaking up Microsoft might improve the satisfaction of con­sumers (some consumers, perhaps at the expense of the satis­faction of other consumers) are no reasons to violate basic rights. Only if and when there are solid, demonstrable reasons to do so should we throw out the old principles and bring on the new principles. Any such reasons would have to speak to the same level of fundamentally and relevance as that incor­porated by the theory of individual rights itself. Those defending consequentialism, like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, have argued the opposite thesis: Unless one can prove, beyond a doubt, that violating rights in a particular instance is necessarily wrong in the eyes of a "rational and fair man," the state may go ahead and "accept the natural outcome of dominant opinion" and violate those rights.1 Such is now the leading jurisprudence of the United States, a country that inaugurated its political life by declaring to the world that each of us possesses unalienable rights, ones that may never be violated no matter what!


 * 1) **Government is made up of individuals, thus those individuals are still required to act morally under a deontological framework.**
 * Donaldson, prof. of business and ethics, 1995** (Thomas, “Ethics and International Affairs”, p. 149)

The state is not deprived of intentionality, as Hardin alleges, by the fact that “various officials of a particular state must typically reach different conclusions about what is rationally required.” Like corporations and judicial systems, states possess decision-making procedures designed to allow inferences abut the acts and intentions of the state itself fro the acts of individual members. When, for example, majorities of the duly-elected members of both houses of the U.S. Congress approve aid to Poland for the purposes of developing its economic infrastructure, and when the U.S. President concurs, then we may correctly infer that the United States has acted intentionally in giving aid to Poland.