I think that this is a great public forum topic: it relates to a current event that will educate students on some of the nuanc
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Lesson 4.2 Day 3
| 13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 19 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com That is just one of many interpretive arguments that could be made using the Finlay and Snedegar analysis. My top advice for you if you are interested in this kind of argument is to read the Finlay and Snedegar article. They are arguing that there is actually no difference between the agential and non-agential use of ought, but they are responding to people who say that there is. Thus, reading it and investigating the footnotes will give you both sides of the debate. It’s a clear and readable article, too. I won’t be leaving this interpretation of ought behind as I start to talk about broader framework issues. It would be wise for you not to think of little bits of framework and interpretation as being divorced from the case position as a whole. Think instead about an interpretive argument like this setting up a certain cohesive approach to the resolution. Watch for opponents who have tricky but non-cohesive frameworks likely, you will be able to find some contradiction. For example, someone might run this Finlay and Snedegar argument to try to spike out of implementation arguments but then have a criterial structure that relied on the function argument Democracy, Morality, or Both The Resolution as a Question of Democracy A big framework issue on this topic is whether the resolution is a question of what is morally right versus what is consistent with the nature or identity of a democracy. The stakes of the difference here are significant. It might be that compulsory voting violates deontology, utility, virtue ethics, and every other ethics you might think of, but it is still consistent with the identity of a democracy. Conversely, for the negative, you might say that compulsory voting is the single most ethically good thing that someone can do, but it is inconsistent with a democracy and thus no good. You might argue that this is the proper interpretation of the resolution on the basis of the function argument explained above. But you could take other routes, as well. You could argue, in fact, that the Finlay and Snedegar argument justifies this approach to the resolution. Since this is anon- agential sentence, what we’re really analyzing is whether compulsory voting is the best kind of voting policy. It is only appropriate to talk about morality if we’re talking about agent’s obligations, so we should instead talk about whether compulsory voting would be a policy consistent with a democracy’s overall policies. A number of other arguments could be made along these lines. But there is yet another order of interpretive issue to face here. After you’ve justified that the resolution is a question of what is consistent with the identity of a democracy, you face the further question of what kind of democratic identity we’re talking about here. We could be talking about |