How Can You Argue That Death Is Good?

[Audit 39]

From my limited knowledge of the criticism people advocate that death is not necessarily a good thing (this would be more like wipeout which claims that extinction is good because it helps the aliens, environment, etc.) but rather the phasad we are in where we generalize death as being the end all evil and how death is such a horrible thing but in all reality, the purpose of death is to release the soul from the body and all the negative attributes attached to the body but not the soul. Certain people believe that post-death the soul is saved and spends its time in another realm, etc. Obviously, not a bad thing that people should be fearing all the time.

 

However, for wipeout, the argument is really simple: extinction is good for aliens, environment, etc. This is an argument you usually run when you have nothing better to say. I guess the best strategy is to extend your opponents extinction impacts and their solvency mechanism and assume immediate extinction post-negative ballot and defend the impact turn that extinction is a good thing. There is probably some sort of framework you have to convey to your critic otherwise even the little amount of judge bias may err an affirmative ballot as the critic probably wants to live and doesn't give a crap about aliens.

[slurker 19]

I think your analysis of the criticism is probably true. However, I think the objective of this post was to find ways to circimvent the seemingly intuitive claim that we should avoid death.

 

Moreover, several of the alt authors argue that we should "embrace our mortality", a statement dangerously close to dying good.

 

I have also found that in order for this argument to be conveyed properly, it must be spun in a way that is not offensive to judges. Almost everyboady has an inherent drive to live, and this K kind of clashes with that. So instead of saying "people die, which is good", I would go with something to the tune of "the affirmative's attempts to unconditionally protect life cause the implications of the K".

 

This is probably the greatest adv Fear of Death has over other seemingly similar arguments like Wipeout, Malthus, etc. Instead of necesarily arguing that death is good, you can simply argue that the way the affirmative frames the debate in terms of life is bad, or simply that death is inevitable. This allows you to retain some ethos in the debate round, especially if you're not a total dousche about it.

[The Tick 732]

alright, so I saw malthus, as a good argument for death good....but what about hyperspace.....

 

. DEATH FREES US FROM PHYSICAL EXISTENCE TO TRANSCEND AS HYPERSPATIAL OBJECTS.

Terence McKenna, The World’s Foremost Ethnopharmacologist, 1984, “New Maps of Hyperspace,” URL: http://deoxy.org/t_newmap.htm

I suggest that it is much more useful to try to make a geometric model of consciousness, to take seriously the idea of a parallel continuum, and to say that the mind and the body are embedded in the dream and the dream is a higher-order spatial dimension. In sleep, one is released into the real world, of which the world of waking is only the surface in a very literal geometric sense. There is a plenum - recent experiments in quantum physics tend to back this up - a holographic plenum of information. All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere. Information stands outside of time in a kind of eternity - an eternity that does not have a temporal existence about which one may say, "It always existed." It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity. We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.

At death, the thing that casts the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases. Material form breaks down; it ceases to be a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustained against entropy by cycling material in, extracting energy, and expelling waste. But the form that ordered it is not affected. These declarative statements are made from the point of view of the shamanic tradition, which touches all higher religions. Both the psychedelic dream state and the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they reveal to life a task: to become familiar with this dimension that is causing being, in order to be familiar with it at the moment of passing from life.

The metaphor of a vehicle - an after-death vehicle, an astral body - is used by several traditions. Shamanism and certain yogas, including Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. One will recognize what is happening. One will know what to do and one will make a clean break. Yet there does seem to be the possibility of a problem in dying. It is not the case that one is condemned to eternal life. One can muff it through ignorance.

Apparently at the moment of death there is a kind of separation, like birth - the metaphor is trivial, but perfect. There is a possibility of damage or of incorrect activity. The English poet-mystic William Blake said that as one starts into the spiral there is the possibility of falling from the golden track into eternal death. Yet it is only a crisis of a moment - a crisis of passage - and the whole purpose of shamanism and of life correctly lived is to strengthen the soul and to strengthen the ego's relationship to the soul so that this passage can be cleanly made. This is the traditional position.

[Shes legal in dog years 1000000038]

There are two ways to argue 'death good':

 

(A) malthusian policy is neato: 1 death now saves 4 people later when the crunch hits. Overpop is bad, causes genocide and jews to reproduce.

 

( Masochism - this is the zizek/fear of death/Death drive stuff - we should embrace the idea of death and pain as a way to relate ourselves and realign politics. This thought process is liberation.

dude - how the fuck is this 'out of line'??

[shaikenbake 28]

malthus

slows overpopulation...hope you're not trying to say death good in front of a lay...I hit that once and the judge signed her ballot after the 1nc

[slurker 19]

malthus

slows overpopulation...hope you're not trying to say death good in front of a lay...I hit that once and the judge signed her ballot after the 1nc

 

which is an example of a terrible judge.

[Bakunin+Debordxhash=Bey 4]

Ernest becker wrote a book titled the Denial of Death. it's a recasting of freudian thoery that argues the unconscious is formed not on the represion of the Oedipal desires (desire to have sex w/ parent of oppisite sex) but instead based on the repression of the fear of death and the knowledge that we will inevitably die. he argues it is the denial of death that is essentially the root of all human evil and thus we have to accept our own mortality and more generally come to terms w/ death in a conscious and deliberate fashion.

Edited July 18, 2008 by Bakunin+Debordxhash=Bey
clearity

[Asclepius 10]

I'm new to the realm of policy debate, and I've browsed this website a couple of times. What I've seen in a lot of the cards is what would appear to me as being without warrant. You touched on this briefly, and I'd like to expound on it.

 

It seems as if the debaters consider the card itself a warrant, when in my experience the card should simply be the holder for the warrant - the card itself is insufficient as a premise for an argument. IE, A lot of the philosophy I've seen advocated here is "Claim and then explanation of said claim." But there is no proof of whether or not this revolutionary claim is actually TRUE.

 

I don't know if this is how policy debate simply IS, but it would appear to me that without empiricial justification or some methodology to check the correctness of these authors, I don't see how these "cards" can be used as a premise for a conclusion.

 

Thanks for dealing with my noobishness.

[generaljones615 1]

Every time somebody dies and comes back to life they say that it was a magical experience. That it was great. You just need to find some testimonies of people who have died and cone back on the operating table, etc. and read how they said it was peaceful. Death should not be scary thing because it is a great thing. There is no evidence to counter that death is bad. We are only afraid of death because it is unknown. This is the same rationale that fueled racism and fuels homophobia. You can say that death is peaceful, everything shows that death is peaceful, nothing shows that death is not peaceful, the only thing that fuels the fear of death is the opposite team's fear of the unknown. It is ignorant to fear death, which has proven to be peaceful.

[generaljones615 1]

Every time somebody dies and comes back to life they say that it was a magical experience. That it was great. You just need to find some testimonies of people who have died and cone back on the operating table, etc. and read how they said it was peaceful. Death should not be scary thing because it is a great thing. There is no evidence to counter that death is bad. We are only afraid of death because it is unknown. This is the same rationale that fueled racism and fuels homophobia. You can say that death is peaceful, everything shows that death is peaceful, nothing shows that death is not peaceful, the only thing that fuels the fear of death is the opposite team's fear of the unknown. It is ignorant to fear death, which has proven to be peaceful.

[Shes legal in dog years 1000000038]

not all death is peaceful though. Some death is not (Hiroshima anyone??). Having your skin melted off is not a 'peaceful' experince by any means.

[brooklyncamille 10]

Death can be argued good, because you can say that humans are inevitably the bigger problem and that life on the planet would sustain much better without them, therefore the idea of death would be symbolic in completing the cycle of violence that humans have already imposed on the world, honestly this works the best for environment type advocacy. Essentially saying anthro bad etc etc

[techfan2011 26]

You can run Malthus, Wipeout, maybe Fear.

[TheHutt 1472]

You can run Malthus, Wipeout, maybe Fear.

Date fail.

[ce818816 21]

I would argue that the best argument that can be made (and of course it all comes down to how it was made) is in favor of the Malthusian idea of why death can be acceptable. His argument on death is really the only one that I've been exposed to, and as far as I understand he doesn't argue that death is good right out. Rather his argument is that death is acceptable when looking at the bigger picture. His idea was that we should stop intervening in wars and epidemics and the natural disasters all around the world and let nature take its course (this is truly the difficult part to support, especially in front of lay judges but it can be done when you tell the judge that this may be morally reprehensible, but not as much as what will follow if we don't allow nature to take its course). It is in this second section of the Kritik that you show the judge that by intervening and stopping nature, we damn all the following generations to resource wars far worse that what many consider to be resource wars now. His conception of resource wars during the overpopulation period will be that rather than fighting over water rights, we'll literally be fighting over water with, and the same with food, because the world will not be able to provide enough for every person on the planet if we continue to intervene in the natural methods of population control which Malthus argues are wars, natural disasters, etc.

 

I think that this argument could be made relatively well, I just don't know if it would be applicable to this years topic?

[nathan_debate 745]

This thread has several links to explanations of those arguments

http://www.cross-x.com/vb/showthread.php?t=968957

 

Nuclear Malthus or regular Malthus make the most sense to me.

[Zeus 223]

Think of it like you have a score card...Existence has pleasure which gives it a point...but it also has suffering which subtracts a point. Nonexistence has the absence of pleasure which in itself isn't bad or good and the absence of pain which gives it a point.

 

End Score- Non-existence 1, Existence, 0

 

 

[Dr. Fox On Socks 3928]

Think of it like you have a score card...Existence has pleasure which gives it a point...but it also has suffering which subtracts a point. Nonexistence has the absence of pleasure which in itself isn't bad or good and the absence of pain which gives it a point.

 

End Score- Non-existence 1, Existence, 0

 

 

That math doesn't work...

 

If pleasure ("O" for orgasm) = +1

and pain ("H" for hurt) = -1

 

Then existence where both exist (O+H) = (1-1) = 0

and non existence with neither (not O + not H) = (-O + -H) = (-1 + 1) = 0

 

Existence=Non-existence (assuming you place equal weight on pleasure and pain, and they are the only two factors you consider)

 

QED

Edited October 13, 2008 by Fox Sans Socks

[nathan_debate 745]

Interesting academic exercise...but a) totalizing overly-simplistic

 

You have to apply some sort of metric to the time that you're happy, content, and pain/sadness. Most people don't commit suicide because contentment + happiness overwhelms pain/sadness.

 

If I'm content 3 days a week, happy 3 days a week, and sad one day a week....it seems the overall contentment/happiness factor vastly outweighs pain.

 

Far to simplistic to be meaningful for these types of decisions. (even my model falls a bit short)

[nathan_debate 745]

Probably the 6 main arguments against this are:

 

1) Timeframe--you're killing people now (or rather letting them die) to avoid death later.

2) Morality. You are using these people as a means. Its immoral to let people die.

3) Technology will solve the limits to growth, which means resource wars will never happen

4) Nuclear war = extinction (so we never get to save anyone later)

5) Nuclear war escalates (ie other people join in)

6) Nuclear winter

 

Here is one of the Nuclear War good authors Caldwell:

http://www.foundation.bw/SeriousNuclearWar.htm

 

Anyone have other cites? Or arguments either way?