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Sacrificing agency in the political sphere causes bad policymaking and ends in extinction – turns Util

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State K Sacrificing agency in the political sphere causes bad policymaking and ends in extinction – turns Util Boggs 2000 (BOGGS, PF POLITICAL SCIENCE – SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 2K CAROL, THE END OF POLITICS, 250-1) Herm But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism. While Oakeshott debunks political mechanisms and rational planning as either useless or dangerous, the actually existing power structure replete with its own centralized state apparatus, institutional hierarchies, conscious designs, and indeed, rational plans- remains fully intact, insulated from minimalistic critique. In other words, ideologies and plans are perfectly acceptable for elites who preside over established governing systems, but not for ordinary citizens or groups to challenge the status quo. Such one sided minimalism gives carte-blanche to elites who naturally desire as much space to maneuver as possible the flight form “abstract principles” rules out ethical attacks on injustices that many pervade the status quo (slavery or imperialistic wars for example) insofar as those injustices might be seen as too embedded in the social and institutional of the matrix of the time to be the target of oppositional political action. If politics is reduced to nothing other than a process of everyday muddling-through then people are condemned to accept the harsh realities disgusting and demeaning way in which that money is spent are testimony to the mounting corruptions of politics and government.” 17 Given such growing corruption, it follows that the often-heard appeals to “realism” and pragmatism- so typical of Oakeshott-style discourse- can only lead right back to established modes of doing business. What this suggests, for example, is that any hope of “solving” deep social problems will have to advanced in a minimalistic framework that will never go further tepid social policies that leave business interests totally unaffected, or cosmetic reforms, or the “greening ” of huge corporations that simply want to profit off environmentally-critical goods, and so forth. A much needed radical agenda geared to sustainable, egalitarian, and ecologically balanced forms of production and consumption is automatically ruled out by the minimalistic scenario. A thorough going revival of politics-one that vigorously questions and seeks to go beyond the routinized liberal pragmatism favored by Oakshott-is a precondition for the transcending this political predicament. Of course, any distinctly political imperative flies in the face of a deeply antipolitical culture where politics has such an unsavory association with money corruption, interest peddling, scandals, PACs, bureaucracy, and largely irrelevant campaign spectacles- where indeed politics has been reduced to a farcial representation of its most enduring motifs. For the most part people in the united state normal politics means little more than false promises and empty discourses that might serve to improve people’s lives. The concept of politics that informs this book, however, holds out prospects for a more empowering, participatory,  transformative legacy compatible with an enlarged public sphere and the subversion of corporate hegemony. While this concept imputes an ethical and visionary dimension to politics, it also points toward the matter of strategic necessity in that politics constitutes the only (potential) countervailing power against corporate domination. Localized, and extrapolitical opposition can lay the groundwork for popular movement , but alone (in the absence of more generalized structural mediations) such opposition will never lead to large scale societal change. Notwithstanding Oakeshott, therefore, an imminent retrieval of politics becomes an urgent imperative at a time when destructive global forces cannot be tamed by a pragmatic, muddling-through modus operandi. Ethics depend on context – that makes material action necessary Burns 08 Lawrence, Professor in History of Medicine at the King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario, “Identifying concrete ethical demands in the face of the abstract other: Emmanuel Levinas’ pragmatic ethics”, Philosophy Social Criticism March 2008 vol. 34 no. 3  While we may grant that the face signifies outside of every context and is irreducible to any given set of norms of action, it is also essential to see that the disruption of the particular context is an essential function of the face. The revelation that the prevailing habitual modes of action and belief are problematic and cause suffering is what gives the face its real power to teach responsibility and invests the subject with the power to act on the other’s behalf. On this reading, the concrete context of action is not forsaken in the turn to the other; rather, the particular content of the other’s suffering anchors the other to a particular context of action, while the obligation to repair that suffering is not simply a contextual affair dependent on local norms of action. It is instead an absolute imperative that turns the subject into what Levinas calls a singularity, one who is unique because of his or her responsibility for the other here and now (Levinas, 1987: 116). The justification for this more ‘concrete’ view of ethical responsibility in the ‘here and now’ rather than an abstract beyond may be found in Levinas’ explicit claim that the face is a ‘body-expression’ (TI, 258/259). As I show below, we should take this to mean that the face is corporeal (a body) to the extent that it appears within a concrete context oriented around the subject’s powers of enjoyment and action; yet, the face also expresses a command to the subject, namely the command to justify his or her enjoyment to the other. Thus, instead of excluding the calculation of different responses to concrete ethical demands as Ricoeur feared, the demand for justification obliges the subject to perform the calculation demanded by Ricoeur. In light of this pressing demand, the context of action and enjoyment within which she or he is situated is transformed. What we are left with is an admittedly thin account of ethics that is rooted in embodiment and the relevant context of action with its contingent features. However, this thin account respects key pragmatist aspects of morality. In order to elucidate Levinas’ account of ethical responsibility, I will present both the corporeal and expressive elements of the face. This is especially true in the context of economic oppression Burns 08 Lawrence, Professor in History of Medicine at the King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario, “Identifying concrete ethical demands in the face of the abstract other: Emmanuel Levinas’ pragmatic ethics”, Philosophy Social Criticism March 2008 vol. 34 no. 3  While not a materialist in a Marxist sense, Levinas lends himself to such a reading. However, the goods that I enjoy are not solely economic; rather, given the expansive nature of enjoyment, everything that is constitutive of my egoism is a resource in the relevant sense. Throughout Totality and Infinity, the separated, enjoying subject is characterized as an ego and ethical relations are rooted in the subject’s egoistic enjoyment: ‘Pluralism implies a radical alterity of the other, whom I do not simply conceive by relation to myself, but confront [j’affronte] out of my egoism’ (TI, 121/126). Only egoistic subjects, i.e. subjects who accumulate possessions and capacities for action, can have an ethical relation to the other. This means that I can only encounter the other as situated in a particular context of action, the situation of my egoistic enjoyment of the world. This context of action includes my background beliefs as well as my material resources. And while the other reveals to me exactly how ‘rich’ I am, in so doing he or she also calls my right to that enjoyment into question: The movement toward the other, instead of completing or contenting me, implicates me in a conjuncture which in a way did not concern me and should leave me indifferent – why did I get involved in this business? Whence came this shock when I passed, indifferent – under the Other’s gaze? The relationship with the other puts me into question, empties me of myself and empties me without end, showing me ever new resources. I did not know I was so rich, but I no longer have the right to keep anything for myself. (Levinas, 1996: 52/49) I view this description of how my relation to the other reveals the resources that I possess as a kind of ethical reduction in the phenomenological sense. In detaching from my unique point of view, I can look at my situation from the perspective of the disparity between my enjoyment and the claims of the other (i.e. his poverty). This disparity makes me responsible, i.e. conscious of the injustice suffered by the other, even though it does not mean that I will act in a responsible manner. Instead, I learn to question why and how I am implicated in the injustice I see. Moreover, I need to develop a justification as to why these possessions (broadly construed so as to include even my capacity to act) are rightly mine and why they should not instead be given to the other. Given the extent to which the enjoying subject is identified with his or her possessions, giving to the other also requires that the subject place herself or himself at the disposal of the other. That is to say, the subject enjoys not only her or his material goods but also her or his skills, knowledge, friends, and resources in the broadest sense: in short, the subject enjoys the totality of her or his involvements and habits of action. Descriptions of the weight of the other’s suffering that commands me to justify myself draw attention to the responsiveness presupposed by the communicative encounter. The face that addresses me by ‘undoing the form he presents’ (TI, 66/61) now becomes the recipient of my gift: ‘To recognize the Other is to give’ (TI, 75/73). The awareness of my capacity to give can only be provoked by the other’s need, and so expressiveness and vulnerability must be rooted in the specificity of our embodied situation in the world. The justification for this claim lies in the meaning of vulnerability itself. Vulnerability and suffering are deficient modes of enjoying, but in order to know that they are deficient one has to be able to compare the enjoyment of the other to one’s own. The question of justified enjoyment can now be posed, which is essentially the following: why am I entitled to enjoy the world in the way that I do? True, the face is abstract to the extent that it always connotes mastery and height, yet these qualities are anchored to concrete cases of problematic behaviour and suffering that obligate the subject to seek to repair them. Moreover, the face commands the subject to repair that behaviour or give to the other in a way that does have some content, i.e. whatever it takes to repair the suffering. Thus, instead of being an irrelevant abstraction, the face refers to a concrete experience of the other’s suffering for which responsibility is attributed to the subject. The other’s misery and poverty are revealed in relation to my ‘riches’, which means that the other’s demands are concrete rather than empty abstractions because of this focus on my enjoyment and the need to justify it in light of the suffering of the other. Moreover, the imperative is abstract and absolute in that it is not merely a contextual component of action; that is to say, the context as such is the source of the injustice (i.e. the particular contexts, habits, and social norms) and the responsible subject is called upon to repair that context. Nonetheless, the force of the imperative motivates the subject to intervene in the particular context of action and enjoyment in order to justify it. Integration of ethics into politics is key to prevent totalitarianism Tahmasebi 10 Victoria, assistant professor in women's studies/humanities at the University of Toronto Scarborough, “Does Levinas justify or transcend liberalism? Levinas on human Liberation”, Philosophy Social Criticism June 2010 vol. 36 no. 5 The liberal readings of Levinas’ ethics, however, point to a deeper dilemma, namely the arrival of the ‘third’. All Levinasian scholars agree that the appearance of the third raises the necessity of thematization, calculation and judgment. From this, the majority of these scholars conclude that the third introduces the question of politics into ethics (and not vice versa). They view the entry of the third as the limitation of the subject’s infinite responsibility – the third, it is argued, demands formal justice, and, by extension, the law, political violence expressed in the state’s institutions and hierarchy. 76 The third is seen only as the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question, What do I have to do with justice? Indeed, Levinas himself seems at times to argue along this line, as the following quote suggests: ‘The self, the I, cannot limit itself to the incomparable uniqueness of each one. . . . Behind the unique singularities, one must perceive the individuals of a genus, one must compare them, judge them and condemn them.’ 77 Alternatively, on the necessity of the state he argues: ‘The State, general laws, are necessary. Institutions are necessary to carry out decisions. Every work of politics and justice is necessary. This order negates mercy. . . . Is this concern for reconsideration . . . not in effect the essence of democracy and of the liberal State, the sign of a mercy and charity that breathe there?’ 78 I argue that there is usually more to what Levinas says when he discusses the third and its relation to sociality and human liberation, creating a different context from the usual, aforementioned interpretation. This surplus is ignored, or not seriously considered, by the majority of Levinas’ readers. 79 The first aspect of the surplus that must be emphasized is Levinas’ repeated insistence that not only is the state required by ethics itself (and not despite it), but the state must be oriented to concretize ethics in politics: ‘it is in the name of that responsibility for the other . . . that goodness to which the face of the other man appeals, that the entire discourse of justice is set in motion.’ 80 For Levinas, not only do politics and the state originate in goodness, but goodness must be present in every working of politics. Levinas’ sense of goodness cannot be reduced to charity or mercy, or to a Kantian goodness that takes as its a priori the will of a rational being, concretized and expressed in reciprocity. 81 Goodness, in Levinas’ thought, originates in positing being as the anarchy of desire, obsessing the subject about substituting for the other. 82 In this sense goodness finds itself in society as prioritizing responsibility for the other over reciprocal exchange. As such, society – plurality – no longer means ‘the coherence of the elements that constitute plurality’, 83 but rather peace. The question that Levinas leaves us with is whether political power (and its state), including the liberal democratic state, can ever reformulate itself to contain, and become the expression of, this anarchical goodness. The second aspect of the surplus in Levinas’ discussion of the third is the resistance of the structure of betrayal against the formation of a political totality. The state must realize the incompleteness of its own formal justice, which is less just than the ethics that instigates it. Levinas states: ‘Inspired by love for one’s fellow man, reasonable justice is bound by legal structures and cannot equal the goodness that solicits and inspires it.’ 84 The third aspect of the surplus is the possibility that the betrayal that stems from the fact of mediation can be minimized or reduced to bare necessity. This realization cannot remain at the level of a formal recognition. Rather the state, whose legitimacy is derived from one’s responsibility for the other, must reduce the effect of this betrayal. Formal justice – laws, institutions and so on – exists to oblige the state to fulfill its social promise, which is ‘the possibility for a man to see the face of the other man’. 85 In contrast to liberal readings of Levinas, the state is not merely the expression of this betrayal; rather, the state must intervene in interhuman relationships to reduce the effects of this betrayal. Forgetting this important aspect, according to Levinas, amounts to sinking the state, and its justice, into a totalitarian and ideological deduction. More importantly, it leads to politics forgetting to invent new forms of human coexistence. 86 We need to put Levinas’ citations on the necessity of the state, introduced at the beginning of this section, into this broader context. Then, the limitations of the reading, which describes the third as necessitating the existing state and which justifies the work of its formal justice, become apparent. This reductive reading articulates both the political and its structures as ontological givens stemming from the unresolved paradox between ethics and politics. Roads CP Making the roads and highways bigger costs too much and doesn’t solve for people without automobiles Litman 06, Masters of Environmental Studies, Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington), 1995. BA, with emphasis on urban planning, Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington), 1983. Lessons From Katrina and Rita What Major Disasters Can Teach Transportation Planners Todd Litman Victoria Transport Policy Institute 13 April, 2006 http://www.vtpi.org/katrina.pdf Cox (2005) argues that urban national highways should be expanded to facilitate automobile evacuations, but the costs would be immense since expanding urban highways is particularly costly. Current roadway funding is hardly adequate to maintain the current system and there appears to be little public support for tax increases. It would be inefficient to size all roadways for evacuations that only occur once a century at any particular location, if other strategies can accommodate such needs at lower cost. Described differently, emergency response requires mobility. Automobiles provide mobility, but have high total costs and constraints that limit their use in some situations and for some people, particularly those most vulnerable. Although it makes sense to increase automobile affordability through true cost-saving strategies such as carsharing and Pay-As-You-Drive insurance (“Affordability,” VTPI, 2005), it is wrong to assume that automobile solutions are most appropriate or cost effective in every situation Those without vehicles were unable to evacuate because of the lack of mass transit Jarzab et al. 10 James T. Jarzab Vice-President Emtrac Systems Harvey Alexander Manager, ITS Systems Support Branch Transportation Operations Administration District of Columbia Department of Transportation James R. Jarzab Assistant Planner Emtrac Systems Potential Use of Technology: Mitigating Disaster Evacuation Presented at the 5th International Social Science Research Conference September 23-25, 2010 New Orleans, Louisiana Hilton Riverside http://www.emtracsystems.com/MitigatingDisasterEvacuation.pdf The events following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina is one of the most thoroughly publicized demonstrations of the need for improved planning and capital programming regarding the use of public transit resources in emergency evacuations. Hurricane Katrina forced many New Orleans metro residents to flee and caused severe damage to the structures and facilities throughout the Gulf Coast. Though many considered the evacuation of New Orleans during Katrina a relative success, it revealed many transportation infrastructure failures and the limitation of responders to evacuate groups like the elderly, low income, and chronically ill. Thousands of residents, particularly those from lower income communities, were unable to evacuate the urban area using personal vehicles. According to the plan, these population segments with few transportation options were to be directed by officials to make their way toward “refuges of last resort” in order to be removed using higher capacity transit services. However, this part of the evacuation plan ran afoul of numerous logistical and strategic problems when it came to moving such large numbers substantial distances in such a short period of time. It is estimated that over 100,000 people were left behind in New Orleans as a result of the evacuation and most of these had very few options for evacuating. Two glaring problems in the design and implementation of emergency planning contributed to logistical inefficiencies and obstacles in the evacuation: the overall minor role mass transit resources played in the evacuation and the resources committed to evacuating population segments with few transportation options. First, there was not a dedicated use of all available mass transit vehicles to help efficiently evacuate residents in the evacuation plan. Though some local jurisdictions used regional transit buses to evacuate, these plans were not coordinated with their surrounding regions and had little communication between district and jurisdictions; furthermore, there was little use of plentiful school buses. In fact, the evacuation plan for New Orleans called for the use of transit services to move population segments with few transportation options from the city but was never initiated. Instead, the Regional Transit Authority was ordered by the Mayor to evacuate residents to the established “refuges of last resort,” such as the Superdome, instead of outside the danger zones. Consequently, the residents in these refuges--the majority of which were mobility-limited or low-income residents--were not evacuated until almost three days later. The second problem--the lack of response to population segments with few transportation options--is unsurprising considering the atmosphere of evacuation planning in New Orleans. Much of the planning that occurred before the storm to accommodate population segments with few transportation options relied heavily on “neighbor helping neighbor” policies that were of limited success. The Victoria Transport Policy Institute describes New Orleans’s public transport evacuation as follows: “…bus deployment was ad hoc, implemented by officials during the emergency without a detailed action plan… Katrina’s evacuation was relatively effective for people with automobiles but failed transit-dependent residents” 2 . Those regional evacuation plans that did contain the use of bus or transit services to move people from the city were heavily focused on local efforts and only minimally coordinated with local evacuation plans. Also, many of the local transit resources were committed to multiple groups that placed heavy strain on already heavily taxed transit resources. As a result, thousands of low mobility residents were stranded in the several refuges and not successfully evacuated until days later. 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