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 39 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com Topic Analysis by Clay Spence Like they usually do, most debate coaches complained about the compulsory voting resolution when it came out. I couldn’t disagree with their criticism more. On the September/October topic delves into a wide array of literature concerning the philosophy of democracy what ideals democratic states strive towards and what democratic states can be obligated to do. In my experience LDers tend to focus on framework arguments rooted in abstract metaethical theories which take as their starting point a fact about the nature of an individual human being. While this topic certainly allows for such approaches, it also creates an interesting opportunity for debaters to shortcut directly to a solid body of political philosophy on democracy in crafting their frameworks. One reason I like the current topic is that the terms are fairly uncontroversial. Compulsory voting really means compulsory turnout Lijphart’s article (which is the base article for most of the topic literature) defines it as such, and every article I’ve read has agreed. From a commonsense perspective it seems clear that the only way to reconcile the traditional secret ballot with an obligation to make voting compulsory is to force attendance at the polls. The word ought in the resolution denotes an obligation. There are at least three different forms the obligation could take prudential, moral, and functional. I tend to think the resolution is a question of the latter two, since the obligations of a democracy are constrained by its nature as a democracy, and moral obligations generally supersede prudential ones. Moreover, most of the literature I’ve read has appealed to the basic moral concepts (freedom, rights) that justify democracy. The phrase in a democracy is a key modifier to the resolution voting ought to be compulsory. The resolutional actor is an individual democratic state, but in its pure form the resolution suggests that each and every democratic state has an obligation to make voting compulsory. Since the implied actor in the resolution is a democratic state, I think a worthwhile interpretational argument to make is that the phrase in a democracy implies that debaters need to contextualize their framework arguments in terms of what democratic states have obligations to do. In other words, I don’t think vague appeals to metaethics are sufficient on this topic. Naturalism and practical reason don’t seem immediately relevant, and I think debaters would have to do a lot of work contextualizing their individual-centric ethical theory to the resolution. A compelling response to these kinds of abstract frameworks is to explain why democratic governments have a different set of obligations than individual persons. |