T Subsets

Substantially means across the board, vote neg for limits to prevent thousands of
miniscule subsets
Brian Anderson 5, Becky Collins, Barbara Van Haren & Nissan Bar-Lev, WCASS Research / Special
Projects Committee* Report on: A Conceptual Framework for Developing a 504 School District Policy,
http://www.specialed.us/issues-504policy/504.htm

A substantial limitation is a significant restriction as to the condition, manner, or duration under which an individual can
perform a particular major life activity as compared to the condition, manner, or duration under which the average person in the
general population can perform that same major life activity.¶ The 504 regulation does not define substantial limitation, and the regulation gives discretion to schools to decide
what substantial limitation is. The key here is to be consistent internally and to be consistent with pertinent court decisions.¶ The issue “Does it substantially limit

the major life activity?” was clarified by the US Supreme Court decision on January 8th, 2002 , “Toyota v. Williams”. In this labor related case, the

Supreme Court noted that to meet the “substantially limit” definition, the disability must occur across the
board in multiple environments, not only in one environment or one setting. The implications for school related 504 eligibility decisions are clear: The disability in
question must be manifested in all facets of the student’s life, not only in school.
 T Preexistence
“Increase” requires pre-existence, vote neg for limits to prevent millions of new
programs
Brown 3 – US Federal Judge – District Court of Oregon (Elena Mark and Paul Gustafson, Plaintiffs, v.
Valley Insurance Company and Valley Property and Casualty, Defendants, 7-17, Lexis)

FCRA does not define the term "increase." The plain and ordinary meaning of the verb " to increase" is to make
something greater or larger. 4 Merriam-Webster's [**22] Collegiate Dictionary 589 (10th ed. 1998). The "something" that is increased
in the statute is the "charge for any insurance." The plain and common meaning of the noun "charge" is "the price demanded for something."
Id. at 192. Thus, the statute plainly means an insurer takes adverse action if the insurer makes greater (i.e., larger) the price demanded for
insurance.

An insurer cannot "make greater" something that did not exist previously . The statutory definition of adverse action,
therefore, clearly anticipates an insurer must have made an initial charge or demand for payment before the insurer can increase that charge.
In other words, an insurer cannot increase the charge for insurance unless the insurer previously set and demanded payment of the premium
for that insured's insurance [**23] coverage at a lower price.
 T Three Tier
Topical affs must use 3 tiers
Reid-Brinkley 8 - PhD from UGA, professor of communications at the University of Pittsburgh (Shanara, “THE HARSH REALITIES OF
“ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE”)

The process of signifyin’ engaged in by the Louisville debaters is not simply designed to critique the use of
traditional evidence. As Green argues, their goal is to “challenge the relationship between social power and knowledge.”57 In other
words, those with social power within the debate community are able to produce and determine
“legitimate” knowledge. These legitimating practices usually function to maintain the dominance of normative
knowledge-making practices, while crowding out or directly excluding alternative knowledge-making 83 practices.
The Louisville “framework looks to the people who are oppressed by current constructions of power. ”58
Jones and Green offer an alternative framework for drawing claims in debate speeches, they refer to it as a three-tier process: A
way in which you can validate our claims, is through the three-tier process. And we talk about personal experience,
organic intellectuals, and academic intellectuals. Let me give you an analogy. If you place an elephant in the room and send
in three blind folded people into the room, and each of them are touching a different part of the elephant. And they come back outside and you
ask each different person they gone have a different idea about what they was talking about. But, if you let those people converse and bring
those three different people together then you can achieve a greater truth.59 Jones argues that without the three tier process
debate claims are based on singular perspectives that privilege those with institutional and economic
power. The Louisville debaters do not reject traditional evidence per se, instead they seek to augment or supplement what counts as
evidence with other forms of knowledge produced outside of academia. As Green notes in the double-octo-finals at CEDA Nationals,
“Knowledge surrounds me in the streets, through my peers, through personal experiences, and everyday wars that I fight with my mind.”60 The
thee-tier process: personal experience, organic intellectuals, and traditional evidence, provides a method of argumentation that taps into
diverse forms of knowledge-making practices. With the Louisville method, personal experience and organic intellectuals are placed on par with
traditional forms of evidence. While the Louisville
debaters see the benefit of academic research , they are also
critically aware of the normative practices that exclude racial and ethnic minorities from policy-oriented
discussions because of their lack of training and expertise. Such exclusions prevent radical solutions to
racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia from being more permanently addressed. According to Green: bell
hooks talks about how when we rely solely on one perspective to make our claims, radical liberatory theory
becomes rootless. That’s the reason why we use a three-tiered process. That’s why we use alternative forms of discourse such
as hip hop. That’s also how we use traditional evidence and our personal narratives so you don’t get just one perspective claiming to be the
right way. Because it becomes a more meaningful and educational view as far as how we achieve our education.61 The use
of hip hop and personal experience function as a check against the homogenizing function of academic
and expert discourse. Note the reference to bell hooks. Green argues that without alternative perspectives, “radical libratory theory
becomes rootless.” The term rootless seems to refer to a lack of grounded-ness in the material circumstances
that academics or experts study. In other words, academics and experts by definition represent an intellectual
population with a level of objective distance from that which they study. For the Louisville debaters, this distance is
problematic as it prevents the development of a social politic that is rooted in the community of those most
greatly affected by the status of oppression.

Vote neg
1 Disembodiment, they make politics a spectator sport that doesn’t affect us leading
to policies like drone strikes with little regard for the people on the ground
2 Presumption, the aff doesn’t pass or do anything absent groundedness
 P Spec
The affirmative should specify the policy that they enact. That’s key to avoid
vagueness, and prevent plans that say nothing to dodge competition, creating a rush
to generics and a conditional aff
Presume neg, the aff is moot
LII No Date / Legal Information Institute, xx-xx-xxxx, "Void for vagueness,"
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/void_for_vagueness

1) In criminal law, a declaration that a law is invalid because it is not sufficiently clear.  Laws
are usually found void for
vagueness if, after setting some requirement or punishment, the law does not specify what is required
or what conduct is punishable.  For more information, see vagueness doctrine.
 T Three branches
USFG is 3 branches, vote neg to prevent thousands of agency affs
U.S. Legal ’16 [U.S. Legal; 2016; Organization offering legal assistance and attorney access; U.S. Legal,
“United States Federal Government Law and Legal Definition,” https://definitions.uslegal.com/u/united-
states-federal-government/]

The United States Federal Government is established by the US Constitution. The Federal Government shares sovereignty over the United
Sates with the individual governments of the States of US. The Federal government has three branches: i) the legislature, which is
the US Congress, ii) Executive, comprised of the President and Vice president of the US and iii) Judiciary. The US
Constitution prescribes a system of separation of powers and ‘checks and balances’ for the smooth functioning of all the three branches of the
Federal Government. The US Constitution
limits the powers of the Federal Government to the powers assigned to it; all
powers not expressly assigned to the Federal Government are reserved to the States or to the people.
 T Its
“Its” requires exclusive federal protection, vote neg for limits to prevent restricting
millions of private sector actions
Updegrave ’91 [W.C.; August 19; Supreme Law.org, “Explanation of ZIP Code Address Purpose,”
http://www.supremelaw.org/ref/zipcode/updegrav.htm]
More specifically, looking at the map on page 11 of the National ZIP Code Directory, e.g. at a local post office, one will see that the first digit of
a ZIP Code defines an area that includes more than one State. The first sentence of the explanatory paragraph begins: "A ZIP Code is a
Note the singular
numerical code that identifies areas within the United States and its territories for purposes of ..." [cf. 26 CFR 1.1-1(c)].
possessive pronoun "its", not "their", therefore carrying the implication that it relates to the "United States" as a
corporation domiciled in the District of Columbia (in the singular sense), not in the sense of being the 50 States of the
Union (in the plural sense). The map shows all the States of the Union, but it also shows D.C., Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, making the
explanatory statement literally correct.
 Effects T
They’re, effects T. There are 4 tests that the aff must pass to prove they meet. They
only pass 1 of them. Effects T creates an infinite amount of affs as long as they can
read a card about water pollution, which overcomes clash and preparation.
Batterman citing Cheshier 21 – Cheshier is Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of
Debate at Georgia State University. His column appears monthly in the Rostrum. (Bill; Published: July 10,
2021; “Digging Into The Debate Theory Archives: Cheshier on Effects Topicality”; The 3NR; Accessed: July
19, 2021; https://the3nr.com/2021/07/10/digging-into-the-debate-theory-archives-cheshier-on-effects-
topicality/#comment-359912)//CYang
In an attempt to “fix” or avoid the “mixing burdens” problem, these late-1990s resolutions used an alternate construction. Instead of requiring
the affirmative to mandate a particular outcome, they required the affirmative to mandate a type of policy or program “to” achieve a stated
outcome. While this did resolve some of the aforementioned problems, it also created new controversies. That’s what Cheshier addresses in
this article. In it, he describes four possible “tests” for determining effects topicality:

- Does the plan announce itself as a policy to achieve the resolution’s stated goal?
- Does the case claim only advantages based on achieving the resolution’s stated goal?
- Does someone else (in the topic literature) say this is a plan to achieve the resolution’s stated
goal?
- The “vacuum test” — essentially, could the plan exist and make sense in a world without the
resolution’s stated goal?
 K Standing reserve
The affirmative reduces water to a standing reserve causing extinction – vote neg for a
relational understanding of water
Paul 19 [Kalpita Bhar; 8/28/2019; Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Krea University, PhD in
Environmental Humanities from Manipal University; “A Heideggerian Perspective on Thinking about
Water: Revisiting the Transition from Hydrology to Hydrosocial Nexus”, Journal of Environmental
Philosophy, Volume 16, Issue 2, p. 344-346, DOA: 3-10-2021] |Trip|

Driven entirely by a managerial attitude in the case of water management, we see water as a resource
that we manipulate and manage through technology. Consequently, managers are those who possess the know-how of the
techno-managerial solutions to various water issues. Here, thinking about water comes with a purpose
and a definite goal. This kind of thinking Heidegger calls calculative thinking . This managerial attitude
toward things arises from the calculated intention of serving specific predefined purposes. The desire to
control, dominate, and manipulate water for achieving particular purposes arises from the calculative
mode of thinking. As Heidegger asserts, “calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates” (Heidegger 1966, 46). Now,
the question to contemplate is: does the shift from water management to water governance necessarily suggest a simultaneous shift in our
thinking about water?

In the case of water governance, the attempts to manage water or resolve any water issue has become more efficient where various
stakeholders are given equal importance. One can say that involvement by multiple stakeholders ensures voices across the community are duly
considered, and that eventually leads us to transcend the calculative mode of thinking. However, on the ground, reaching out to various
stakeholders is merely a tool for effective management of water issues. Involving multiple stakeholders is an upshot of the problematization
that has occurred at the beginning itself. Keeping the problematization as a departure point to think about water follows the same trajectory of
calculative thinking. It only becomes inclusive in terms of collating diverse perspectives in the process of thinking. Here, not only techno-
scientists or policymakers think about water in a calculative manner but also other stakeholders who get included in the
process begin to think about water from the point of view of solving the issue at hand. Thereby, through water governance,
calculative thinking perpetuates. Although the path hydrosocial approach takes has the potential for transcending calculative
thinking, it falls short since it starts with a preset motive to resolve various water issues. This departure point acts as a
hindrance to going beyond calculative thinking and to think about water without problematizing it. Hence, while thinking about water
and discussing it within this framework, we remain caught in the calculative mode of thinking. Heidegger
explains that the very essence of calculative thinking is that “it computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more
economical possibilities” (ibid). This explanation clarifies that calculative thinking for the sake of its betterment from time to time changes its
forms and produces better ways of handling the issue at hand. I underline here that the transition from water management to water
governance is just an illustration of that very same ‘betterment.

Exploring the Status of Water in this Transition

To explore the ontological status of water and how it is imagined today, in the society at large, we must thoroughly analyze how water is
interpreted in the hydrosocial nexus. In the current era, technology dominates us not only in our everyday activities, but it also influences our
way of revealing things. Heidegger states that the essence of this technology is nothing technological; rather, its essence lies in techné. Owing
to the fact that techné is linked with episteme, technology is a mode of revealing things (Heidegger 1966, 13). This mode is named as
enframing [Gestell], which reveals things as standing reserves, mere resources (Bestand) (1966, 20). And for Heidegger,
this very revelation is a peril for humanity. In this context, I will discuss to what extent water in the hydrosocial nexus gets
revealed as standing reserve. Following Heidegger, Andrew Mitchell, in his book The Fourfold, neatly teases out the pivotal characteristics of
standing reserve. In the following, I will explore whether such characteristics are commensurate with water as it is conceptualized in the
hydrosocial nexus.

Mitchell (2015) points out that whenan object becomes standing reserve, it becomes immediate and self-
present, orderable, available, and most importantly, it losses its connection with a subject. Thereby, he argues that
in the technological era as soon as a thing becomes standing reserve, it is an end of the object (37). Following the
pivotal characteristics of the standing reserve, in the technological era water reveals as more than a mere object; it is standing
reserve. As such it is readily available, we can make use of it immediately, and, most importantly, it is orderable. Here availability does not
mean abundance; it rather indicates that water in its current form is constantly challenged forth to appear as a mere
resource. This fosters an immediate association of water as a natural resource so concrete that it
permeates our everyday understanding of it , to the point that it is strictly unconcealed as a resource. This pervasive actuality of
water is dismissive or indeed oblivious to any other possibilities that it possesses in its relation to human existence. Therefore, this availability
of water in the technological epoch lacks any dynamic relation between the unconcealment and concealment of its meaning. In other words, it
is devoid of the potentiality of revealing water in any other possibility that is beyond its prevailing actuality. Any other possibility of revealing
water beyond its prevailing actuality as a mere resource is excluded a priori. As a result, the
relational reality between water
and human existence that sustains the thing , as understood by Heidegger, remains concealed. In this way, the
essence of water is obscured. We can see that this way of revealing continues in the hydrosocial approach as well.
 Futarchy Counterplan
Counterplan: The United States Federal Government should replace its laws with a
futarchy, to which it should transfer its resources and authority
Empirically futarchy works and incorporates all relevant info
Hanson 13 Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs?* ROBIN HANSON Economics, George Mason
University http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy2013.pdf

Half a century ago, empirical research on individual US voters seemed to

How well-informed is current democratic policy?

confirm the worst fears of democratic skeptics. Few citizens paid much attention to politics . . . Even on important issues such as
government help with jobs, aid to education, or the stationing of American troops abroad, large
proportions of the public did not know what the government was currently doing, where the opposing
parties stood, or even what they themselves wanted to government to do. . . . Less than 20% . . . had
real and stable attitudes on . . . electric power and housing.i Such ignorance continues today. For example, only 29 per cent of US
adults can name their House representative, and only 24 per cent can identify the first amendment of the US constitution.ii Yet formal analysis often suggests that voter info
problems need not be severe.iii For example, it should suffice to have policies chosen by a single central leader, and to have voters evaluate that leader retrospectively based on whether local outcomes visible in their personal lives
seem better than expected. In fact, however, real votes are often based on beliefs about outcomes experienced by millions of distant othersiv, and often rely heavily on prospective policy evaluation. Furthermore, since power is
divided, voters must discern which politicians are responsible for which outcomes. It is also true that voters have many information aids. Voters collect info as a side effect of living, large elections average individual errors, and
political entrepreneurs can advertise. If voters can identify well-informed sources with incentives to honestly share info, voters can defer to such sources. Unfortunately, voters usually have little chance to be pivotal in their voting
or lobbying, and so have only weak incentives to use such sources well. Yes, rational but ignorant voters could recognize their info problem, and reduce it by being more uncertain about their opinions, more suspicion of sources,
and more open to ways to mitigate their ignorance, such as politician financial incentives, source track records, or juries. In fact, however, voters seem not just ignorant, but overconfident in their political views and sources, and
disinterested in mitigating mechanisms. Yes, some say voters have stable coherent opinionsv and learn what they need via cheap “info shortcuts.”vi But more plausibly, voters are “rationally irrational,” proudly seeing “one man

A proud unwillingness to defer to expert opinion

one vote” as validating their opinions, and indulging in such pride because the personal costs of doing so are small.vii

seems confirmed in consistent differences between public and expert opinions. Within all demographic groups studied, those who
know more tend to be more economically conservative and socially liberal.viii Relative to public opinion, expert toxicologists tend to estimate lower risks and higher benefits from using chemicals.ix Expert

economists worry less about foreign aid and down-sizing, and more about reduced productivity
growth; these tendencies remain in the well-educated, after controlling for age, income, and ideology .x
While better info sources can help rational but ignorant voters, arrogant and ignorant voters may ignore such sources, forcing politicians and policy makers to also ignore them. And in fact, public policy often

seems closer to public opinion than to what relevant experts advisexi; governments often use expert advisors more to legitimate
predetermined policies than to gain info to determine policy.xii Wealth differences between nations have greatly increased over the last two centuriesxiii, and many see this as resulting from some nations adopting what are clearly
better economic polices.xiv This suggests a huge info institution failure in the nations that refused to believe in and adopt the clearly better policies. Some explain this as due to irrational and proud voters.xv While many factors
contribute to bad policy, it seems hard to imagine nations adopting them nearly as often if most everyone knew they were bad. Thus an important contribution to bad policy is a failure to aggregate relevant info and put it in the

While government policy may often suffer info

hands of decision makers with sufficient incentives to notice and use that info. II. Info Successes of Speculative Markets

failures, speculative markets show striking info successes . Most markets for stocks, bonds, currency, and commodities futures are called speculative markets
because they let people speculate on future prices by buying or selling today in the hope of reversing their trades later for a profit. Such opportunities to “buy low, sell high” occur when identical durable items are traded frequently
in a market with low transaction costs. Given such opportunities, everyone is essentially invited to be paid to correct the current market price, by pushing that current price closer to the future price. Such invitations are accepted
by those sure enough of their beliefs to put their money where their mouth is, and wise enough not to have lost their money in previous bets. Betting markets are speculative markets trading assets designed let people speculate
on particular matters of fact, such as which horse will win a race. Final bet asset values are defined in terms of later official judgments about the facts in question. By construction, such assets are durable, identical, and can be

The main robust and

created in unlimited supply. Betting and other speculative markets have been around for centuries, and for decades academics have studied their info properties.

consistent finding is that it is usually quite hard, though not impossible, to find info not yet incorporated in
speculative market prices.xvi In laboratory experiments, speculative markets usually aggregate info well,
even with four ignorant traders trading $4 over four minutes.xvii There are, however, noteworthy exceptions. For example, betting markets typically overestimate low probability, or “long shot,” events, though with low transaction
costs specialists usually eliminate this bias. Also, with complex trader info, “info traps” can arise where traders lack info revelation incentives.xviii Such traps can often be avoided by trading in more kinds of related assets. Financial
markets also seem to have excess long-term aggregate price variation, such as financial market bubbles, xix though bubbles can be hard to distinguish from rational info responses.xx Risk and delay discourage specialists from
correcting such errors, and irrationally risky traders can actually get better returns, if not utility, and so are not selected out.xxi Even if speculative markets are distorted by irrational bubbles, however, no known info institution
does better. For example, what other info institution consistently and clearly predicted that we were over-investing during the dotcom or housing bubbles? Yes individual academics or reporters so predicted, but so did individual

a few studies
stock investors. The key issue is not absolute accuracy, but accuracy relative to other institutions, on the same topics, given similar resources. We have some data on this. In addition to lab studies,

directly compare real speculative markets with other real info institutions. For example, racetrack market
odds improve on the prediction of racetrack expertsxxii; orange juice commodity futures improve on
government weather forecastsxxiii; stocks fingered the guilty firm in the Challenger crash long before the
official NASA panelxxiv; Oscar markets beat columnist forecastsxxv; gas demand markets beat gas demand
expertsxxvi; betting markets beat Hewlett Packard official printer sale forecasts xxvii; and betting markets beat Eli Lily official drug trial
forecasts.xxviii The largest known tests compare bet prices to major opinion polls on US presidential elections . For example, in 709 out of 964

comparisons, bet prices were closer to the final result.xxix This gain comes in part from prices being disproportionately influenced by active traders, who suffer less
from cognitive biases.xxx Some have noted that statistical models built from poll data predict past elections better that did betting prices, and could have been used to win bets.xxxi However, if we compare apples to apples,
statistical models built from bet prices predict better than statistical models build from polls.xxxii More important, one group’s statistical model on one topic in not a general institution, to which we could return time and again for
answers on many disputed policy topics. My claim is not that betting prices are always more accurate than other sources, but that they are a robustly accurate public institution estimating policy-relevant topics. When supported
by similar resources and compared on the same topic, they are often substantially better, and only rarely substantially worse, than other info institutions with publicly visible estimates. Speculators provide a valuable service even
when they just evaluate other public info institutions, and echo the most accurate of them. My claim also has little to do with any “wisdom of crowds.”xxxiii Speculators tend to rely more on crowds when crowds know more, and
on experts when experts know more. Yes, the best track bettors have no higher IQ, xxxiv but speculative markets if anything still over-emphasize experts, both public and private.xxxv Instead, the main reasons for superior

stronger accuracy incentives tend to reduce cognitive biases, xxxvi those

speculative market accuracy seem to be incentive and selection effects:

who think they know more tend to trade more, and specialists are paid to eliminate any biases they
can find. These attempted explanations, however, are not the main reason to believe in speculative market accuracy. The main reason is the
robust and consistent empirical track record. We want policy-related info institutions to resist
manipulation, that is, to resist attempts to influence policy via distorted participation. Speculative
markets do well here because they deal well with “noise trading,” that is, trading for reasons other
than info about common asset values. When other traders can’t predict noise trading exactly, they
compensate for its expected average by an opposite average trade, and compensate for its expected
variation by trading more, and by working harder to find relevant info. Theory says that if trader risk-
aversion is mild, and if more effort gives more info, then increased noise trading increases price
accuracy. And in fact, the most accurate real speculative markets tend to be those with the most noise
trading. What do noise traders have to do with manipulators? Manipulators, who trade hoping to
distort prices, are noise traders, since they trade for reasons other than asset value info. Thus adding
manipulators to speculative markets doesn’t reduce average price accuracy. This has been verified in
theory, xxxvii in laboratory experiments, xxxviii and in the field.xxxix

Futarchy should be part of the constitution, the perm severs because the counterplan
bans the plan by eliminating the government
Hanson 7 Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs? Robin Hanson∗ Department of Economics
George Mason University† October 2007 (First Version September 2000)
http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.pdf

Once some government agencies were successful in getting decision advice from speculative markets, a
nation might consider changing its constitution to put such markets at the core of its form of
government. With such a government, we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs. The job of elected
representatives would be limited to defining and overseeing an after the fact measurement of GDP+, a
measure of national welfare. At any one time there would be a market estimating GDP+ given the status
quo Q of no policy change. There would be some official process for proposing new policies, perhaps
involving a proposal fee. And for each new proposal N there would be a market estimating GDP+ if that
proposal were adopted. The basic rule of government would then be: When an approved betting
market clearly estimates that a proposed policy would increase expected GDP+ (E[W|N] > E[W|Q]),
that proposal immediately becomes law. Democracy would still say what we want, but betting markets
would now say how to get it. A very simple definition of GDP+ would be a few percent annually
discounted average (over the indefinite future) of the square root of GDP each period. A not quite as
simple GDP+ definition would substitute a sum over various subgroups of the square root of a GDP
assigned to that subgroup. Subgroups might be defined geographically, ethnically, and by age and
income. (Varying the group weights might induce various types of affirmative action or discrimination
policies.) A more complex GDP+ could include measures of lifespan, leisure, environmental quality,
cultural prowess, and happiness.

Futarchy solves extinction

Tabarrok 14 Alex Tabarrok, 5-13-2014, "Should the Future Get a Vote?," Marginal REVOLUTION,
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/should-the-future-get-a-vote.html
Philosopher Thomas Wells argues that future citizens need the vote today: …future generations must accept whatever we choose to
bequeath them, and they have no way of informing us of their values. In this, they are even more helpless than foreigners, on
whom our political decisions about pollution, trade, war and so on are similarly imposed without consent. Disenfranchised as they are, such
foreigners can at least petition their own governments to tell ours off, or engage with us directly by writing articles in our newspapers about the
justice of their cause. The citizens of the future lack even this recourse. The asymmetry between past and future is more than unfair. Our
ancestors are beyond harm; they cannot know if we disappoint them. Yet the political decisions we make today will do more than
just determine the burdens of citizenship for our grandchildren. They also concern existential dangers such as the likelihood
of pandemics and environmental collapse. Without a presence in our political system, the plight of future citizens who might
suffer or gain from our present political decisions cannot be properly weighed. We need to give them a voice. But how can we solve this
problem? Wells has some very good insights: If current citizens can’t help but be short-sighted, perhaps we should consider
introducing agents who can vote in a far-seeing and impartial way. They would need to be credibly motivated to
defend the basic interests of future generations as a whole, rather than certain favoured subsets, and they would require the
expertise to calculate the long-term actuarial implications of government policies. But then his solution turns
laughable: Such voters would have to be more than human. I am thinking of civic organisations, such as charitable foundations,
environmentalist advocacy groups or non-partisan think tanks. Well’s solution (give these groups votes) is so tied to his conception of what the
“enlightened” future will bring that it clearly fails the far-seeing, impartiality, credibly motivated and expertise requirements that he outlines as
desirable. We need not conclude, however, that Well’s plea is disingenuous or impossible but we do need a better implementation. Robin
Hanson’s government of prediction markets (“futarchy“) is a better approach. It is know well understood that relative to other
institutions prediction markets draw on expertise to produce predictions that are far seeing and
impartial. What is less well understood is that through a suitable choice of what is to be traded, prediction
markets can be designed to be credibly motivated by a variety of goals including the interests of future
generations. To understand futarchy note that a prediction market in future GDP would be a good predictor of
future GDP. Thus, if all we cared about was future GDP, a good rule would be to pass a policy if prediction markets
estimate that future GDP will be higher with the policy than without the policy. Of course, we care about more
than future GDP; perhaps we also care about environmental quality, risk, inequality, liberty and so forth. What Hanson’s futarchy
proposes is to incorporate all these ideas into a weighted measure of welfare. Prediction markets would then be
used to predict and make policy choices based on future welfare. Incorporated within the measure of welfare could be factors like
environmental quality many years into the future. Note, however, that even this assumes that we know what people in the future will care
about. Here then is the final meta-twist. We can also incorporate into our measure of welfare predictions of how future generations will define
welfare. We could, for example, choose a rule such that we will pass policies that increase future environmental quality unless a prediction
market in future definitions of welfare suggests that future generations will change their welfare standards. It sounds complicated but then so
is the problem. In short, more than any other form of government, futarchy
is based on far seeing, impartial, expertise
driven and credibly motivated predictions of future welfare and it is flexible enough to allow for a
wide definition of welfare including taking into account the interests of future generations.
 T Regulation
Water protection requires government regulation limiting behavior.
Bajcetic ’16 [Marko, Zvonko Brnjas, and Bozo Draskovic; 2016; Regular member of the International
Academy of Management and Technology Novi Sad, Serbia; Institute of Economic Science-Belgrade,
Serbia; International Review, “Economic Efficiency of Water Protection Within Environmentally Friendly
and Integrated Water Resources Management,” no. 1-2]
A Water Protection System and Ecology in Water Management

Water is a natural resource, not a commodity, and services are those that enable achieving its quality targets, or its use-value. Thanks to the
services provided, polluted water from a deteriorated natural resource is transformed into good natural resource and new economic resource.

Water protection not only requires government regulations but clearly defined
functions and elements that serve as a basis for establishing administrative and business processes in economic
and financial structures and systems. Transforming the use-value of water from unused natural resource into economic resource
occurs because organizations operating in the water sector are oriented towards increasing economic efficiency. Such orientation implies
defining administrative activities and the use of buildings, devices and facilities based on normative and
technological basis and measures.
The existing technology, the production and the attitude of citizens towards water accelerate water pollution which requires well-designed
water and environmental protection. Water
protection is possible on condition that discharging or receiving polluted
water is subject to prohibition, different conditions or limitations. The primary concern is to choose between different
preventive, technological, economic, regulatory or other solutions that would enable achieving good quality of water at the side of natural
persons and legal entities that pollute it. The second important condition lies in the treatment before the used water is released into a recipient
body of water and water facilities. Third is achieving the quality target by physically, chemically, biologically and ecologically treating the water
area and the drainage basin. There is another special option which is to leave the water to clean itself in the watercourse or for the water to be
released into a larger watercourse.

Water protection, as a field, can be grouped according to: (a) pressures and impacts of natural factors and human activities concerning water
and environmental protection, protected areas and water usage; (b) changes in the nature of movement and fluctuations in water quality; (c)
the methods and procedures for achieving the goals of water protection; (d) types and methods for the implementation of service processes;
(e) the ways and methods of providing and performing water protection services; (f) the needs and demand of the public and users, and
taxpayers - beneficiaries and (g) the applicable laws on water protection.

Water protection system consists of the elements such as various physical, chemical and biological characteristics of
water and technological systems and economic factors which define the limits of allowed impact on water
systems wherever there is water protection management. The water system can be considered an eco-system given that
it includes mutually interconnected factors of different intensity, pressure and effects on water and the environment that require ecological
balance. Ecological balance implies sustaining natural diversity, supporting biological production, developing methods to eliminate negative
pressures and impacts on water, promoting economic efficiency from the demand for water through services provided by the water sector.

Vote negative for limits and ground, they allow thousands of affs such as
infrastructure affs, taxation affs, or affs that ban factory farms, which would improve
environmental quality.
 Ban Counterplan Short
Counterplan: The Supreme Court of the United States should prohibit environmental
policy
Regs kill millions overseas, and allowing even one regulation spills over
Roberts 11 James M. Roberts, 1-24-2011, "How Western Environmental Policies Are Stunting
Economic Growth in Developing Countries," Heritage Foundation, https://www.heritage.org/global-
politics/report/how-western-environmental-policies-are-stunting-economic-growth-developing

Abstract: Governments and large agribusinesses are increasingly using the environmentalist movement
and its policy arm of green nongovernmental organizations to justify imposing protectionist non-tariff
barriers on developing countries. Wrong-headed environmental policies and “green” protectionism are
contributing to a resurgence of malaria in some countries and endangering millions of jobs in
developing countries. Even the World Bank’s mandate to foster economic development is being
subverted to serve environmentalist and protectionist objectives. The EU and the U.S. need to eliminate
protectionist policies and regulations that are masquerading as environmental safeguards and refocus
the World Bank on promoting economic development to alleviate poverty. Decades ago, the use of
DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was banned worldwide for what were generally seen as noble
and unassailable environmental and public health reasons. Today, ample evidence shows that the ban
on DDT spraying has been a tragic mistake. In developing countries, it is linked to millions of preventable
deaths from malaria. Worse, some protectionist European business sectors and activist groups
continue to exploit the fears of DDT in ways that increase the suffering of the poor around the world.
While the DDT ban continues to cause needless suffering, people in the developing world now must bear additional burdens imposed by a variety of U.S. and European Union (EU) environmental and trade policies. EU bans on forestry products and vegetable oils produced in the tropics have endangered millions of private-sector jobs in developing countries. The U.S. Lacey Act, [1] which outlaws trafficking in “illegal” wildlife, fish, and plants, is having a similar effect. Misleading campaigns against genetically modified organisms (GMO) by green nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) and European agricultural interest groups have put more millions at a higher risk of starvation to protect a few wealthy U.S. and European agribusinesses. Some of these efforts by green NGOs have been funded by the taxpayers through grants from the EU and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). These sad consequences starkly contrast with the fundamental assumptions and motives underlying the West’s traditional policies on trade, development assistance, and environmental protection. The pernicious effect of these policies
and regulations on developing countries’ economic freedom and growth is evident from their impact (real and potential) on trade and investment flows, job creation, and changes in per capita income. Western policymakers should end this dangerous and growing practice of imposing protectionist barriers behind the façade of environmental and biodiversity concerns. In particular, the 112th Congress needs to examine these issues and curb the excesses. Non-Tariff Barriers in Environmentalist Camouflage Governments and large agribusinesses are increasingly using
the environmentalist movement and its policy arm of green NGOs to justify imposing protectionist non-tariff barriers (NTBs) on developing country producers while skirting World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. NTBs have become the primary vehicle for erecting trade barriers, which hinder economic freedom and growth. This trend actually began innocently enough decades ago, when Silent Spring, a book by Rachel Carson, led to an almost complete ban on the pesticide DDT. DDT is the most effective pesticide to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Carson’s analysis
claimed to find serious dangers from using DDT— claims later shown to be deeply flawed. Nevertheless, the book became a foundational document in the creation myth of modern environmentalism. Zealous environmentalists cajoled governments around the world first to ban DDT and then to ban a series of other products and practices that activists linked to environmental concerns. This included imposing green NTBs. Environmental activists and monopoly-rent-seeking businesses have since become partners in lobbying governments for statutes and regulations
that have erected de facto NTBs. Public relations campaigns have been used to demonize certain products or to insert discriminatory double standards into relevant EU and U.S. laws and regulations. For example, EU and U.S. regulations arbitrarily categorize certain agricultural production methods in developing countries as “illegal” or a “threat to biodiversity.” This paper reviews some of these campaigns. The DDT Ban: A Tragic Policy Prototype Compared to modern insecticides, producing DDT is relatively easy and inexpensive because it was never patented. It remains
the most effective pesticide in killing malaria-carrying mosquitoes. DDT is one of the most studied chemical substances. It is a few times more toxic than table salt and less toxic than nicotine, and environmental exposure to DDT has caused no known human deaths or illnesses . Beginning in the 1940s, applying DDT to mosquito-breeding pools and to the walls of homes almost completely eradicated malaria in Europe and the United States by the 1960s. However, things began to change in 1962, the year that Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which made the
sensational allegation (offering no proof) that DDT would lead to the extinction of birds.[2] Although Carson’s analysis was later shown to be deeply flawed,[3] Silent Spring became a foundational document in the creation myth of modern environmentalism. Citing Carson’s book, supporters of the DDT ban loudly warned media outlets that a ban was necessary in order to save the robin, bald eagle, and peregrine falcon populations. Scientists who spoke in support of DDT were denounced as corporate shills. Indicative of the political pressure applied by these early
environmentalists, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s first act was to ban most uses of DDT in 1972. USAID worked to spread the DDT ban internationally by threatening to stop foreign aid to any country using it. Environmental alarmists in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Paul Ehrlich, attacked DDT use in malaria-control programs as the “export of death control” from rich countries to poorer countries. Activists questioned the value of malaria eradication through DDT on the grounds that reducing deaths from malaria was contributing to the “world population

. All of the malaria eradication alternatives promoted by

explosion.”[4] In the late 1960s and early 1970s, USAID began shifting foreign aid funds away from malaria control and toward funding family planning programs, partially due to fears of overpopulation

environmentalists—such as introducing fish to eat larval insects, water management, insecticide-treated

nets, and “safer” insecticides—have proven less effective than DDT, more costly, and in some cases
more damaging to the environment. The DDT ban has had tragic consequences. According to the World
Health Organization, there “were an estimated 247 million malaria cases among 3.3 billion people at
risk in 2006, causing nearly a million deaths, mostly of children under 5 years.”[5] Since the decision to
ban DDT was taken— first by the newly established Environmental Protection Agency in 1972, which
“effectively ended the use of DDT in the United States and compromised its use in the rest of the
world”[6]—malaria has reappeared in many countries where it had previously been eradicated. For
example, in Madagascar, DDT spraying reduced cases of malaria by 90 percent, but the number of cases
proliferated after DDT spraying stopped. In 1964, Sri Lanka had almost completely eliminated the
disease, but it returned after DDT use was ended.[7] Some of the first green NTBs grew from the DDT
ban. Zimbabwe stopped using DDT in the 1990s because its tobacco industry feared that the
international market would reject its products if they contained any traces of DDT. EU officials made
veiled threats that the EU would reject the country’s agricultural exports if the government used DDT to
control malaria. This led Ugandan agricultural exporters to pressure the government to halt spraying.
Western corporations involved in the marketing of alternative insecticides have also contributed to the
anti-DDT campaign. For example, a Bayer executive discouraged the use of DDT in Uganda, publicly
citing a possible threat to the country’s food exports while privately revealing that “DDT use is for us a
commercial threat.”[8] While DDT is no panacea, it has a better record than any other malaria
intervention. Successful opposition to its use condemns people to death from a preventable disease.
The fear tactics of environmental groups and their supporters in the media have produced unwarranted
belief that DDT is harmful, leading to scientifically unwarranted political actions, such as bans on DDT.
Tragically, the environmentalists’ war against DDT has become a war against the world’s poor.
 Case
Extinction is good, make them disprove the following syllogism
W=Wellbeing
S=Suffering
P1 We should take actions if they maximize (W-S)
P2 Extinction decreases expected number of universes by an infinite amount
P3 Each universe decreases (W-S)
Therefore, Extinction increases (W-S) by an infinite amount
P4 Extinction does not decrease (W-S) in any ways which outweigh increasing (W-S) by
an infinite amount
Therefore, we should take actions if they cause extinction
Don’t hack against this argument, it’s counterintuitive, but definitely more plausible
than many of the shenanigans that proliferate in debate, and you shouldn’t’ trust your
intuitions about which arguments are true
 Evidence for p1
Util is truetil
MacAskill 21 This website was co-created by William MacAskill, Associate Professor of Philosophy at
the University of Oxford © 2021 Utilitarianism.net, "Arguments for Utilitarianism – Utilitarianism.net,"
https://www.utilitarianism.net/arguments-for-utilitarianism input on 11/13/21
Arguments for Utilitarianism What Fundamentally Matters Moral theories serve to specify what fundamentally matters, and utilitarianism
seems to offer a particularly compelling answer to this question. Almost anyone would agree with utilitarianism that
suffering is bad, and happiness is good. What could be more obvious? If anything matters morally, human well-being surely
does. And it would be arbitrary to limit moral concern to our own species, so we should instead conclude that well-being generally is what
matters. That is, we ought to want the lives of sentient beings to go as well as possible (whether that ultimately comes down to maximizing
happiness, desire satisfaction, or other welfare goods). Could anything else be more important? Such a suggestion can seem puzzling. Consider:
it is (usually) wrong to steal.3 But that is plausibly because stealing tends to be harmful, reducing people's well-being.4 By contrast, more
people are open to redistributive taxation, if it allows governments to provide benefits that reliably raise the overall level of well-being in
society. So it is not that individuals just have a natural right to not be interfered with no matter what. When judging institutional arrangements
(such as property and tax law), we
recognize that what matters is coming up with arrangements that tend to
secure overall good results, and that the most important factor in what makes a result good is that it promotes well-being.5 Such
reasoning may justify viewing utilitarianism as the default starting point for moral theorizing. If someone wants to claim
that there is some other moral consideration that can override overall well-being (trumping the importance of saving lives, reducing suffering,
and promoting flourishing), they face the challenge of explaining how that could possibly be so. Many common moral rules (like those that
prohibit theft, lying, or breaking promises), while not explicitly utilitarian in content, nonetheless have a clear utilitarian rationale. If they did
not generally promote well-being—but instead actively harmed people—it is hard to see what reason we would have to still want people to
follow them. To follow harmful moral rules would seem like a kind of "rule worship", and not truly ethical at all.6 Similar judgments apply to
hypothetical cases in which you somehow know for sure that a typically reliable rule is, in this particular instance, counterproductive. In the
extreme case, we all recognize that you ought to lie or break a promise if lives are on the line. In practice, of course, the best way to achieve
good results over the long run is to respect commonsense moral rules and virtues while seeking opportunities to help others. (It is important
not to mistake the hypothetical verdicts utilitarianism offers in stylized thought experiments with the practical guidance it offers in real life.)
The key point is that utilitarianism offers a seemingly unbeatable answer to the question of what fundamentally matters: protecting and
promoting the interests of all sentient beings to make the world as good as it can be. The Golden Rule, the Veil of Ignorance, and the Ideal
Observer Humans are masters of self-deception and motivated reasoning. If something benefits us personally, it is all too easy to convince
ourselves that it must be okay. To correct for such self-serving biases, it can be helpful to consider moral heuristics like the Golden Rule: "do
unto others as you would have them do unto you." Many ethical traditions endorse some form of the Golden Rule. Of course, it needs to be
interpreted sensibly: we would not want a masochist to go around whipping people who are not so into that as he is. The idea underlying the
Golden Rule is arguably the equal consideration of interests: that we "give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all
those affected by our actions,"7 just as we would want others to do with our interests. One vivid way to do this is to imagine yourself in the
position of each affected person, one after the other, living each of their lives (with their tastes and preferences) in sequence. If you were,
in effect, everybody, what would it be rational for you to choose? R. M. Hare argued that the answer was preference
utilitarianism: to best satisfy everyone's overall preferences, counting everyone equally. Of course, if you accept a different theory of well-
being,8 then you might think it worth overriding misguided or irrational preferences for the sake of greater happiness or other forms of
flourishing. But it remains the case that some form of utilitarianism seems likely to follow from such a procedure of putting yourself into every
person's shoes. Similar
results may be obtained by instead imagining that you are looking down on the
world from behind a "veil of ignorance" that reveals the facts about each person's circumstances in society, while hiding from
you the knowledge of which of these individuals you are.9 Imagine you were trying to decide on the best structure for society from behind this
veil of ignorance. If you view yourself as equally likely to end up being anyone in the world, it would seem prudent to maximize overall well-
being, just as utilitarianism prescribes.10 Finally, impartiality might be secured by simply asking what a suitably disinterested but benevolent
observer would want. For example, whether or not one believes that any God exists, one might consider the hypothetical question of what an
ideal (all knowing and all loving) observer would want—as it is plausible that the answer to this question would also settle what we ought to do.
But then, it seems hard to deny that a benevolent impartial observer would simply want whatever would be
best overall, that is counting everyone's interests equally. And that in turn means that it is hard to deny utilitarianism. Expanding the Moral
Circle When we look back on past moral atrocities—like slavery or denying women equal rights—we recognize that they were often sanctioned
by the dominant societal norms at the time. The perpetrators
of these atrocities were grievously wrong to exclude their
victims from their "circle" of moral concern.11 That is, they were wrong to be indifferent towards (or even delight in) their
victims' suffering. But such exclusion seemed normal to people at the time. So we should question whether we might likewise be blindly
accepting of some practices that future generations will see as evil but that seem "normal" to us.12 The best protection against making such an
error ourselves would be to deliberately expand our moral concern outward, to include all sentient beings—anyone who can suffer—and so
recognize that we have strong moral reasons to reduce suffering and promote well-being wherever we can, no matter who it is that is
experiencing it. While this conclusion is not yet all the way to full-blown utilitarianism, since it is compatible with, for example, holding that
there are side-constraints limiting one's pursuit of the good, it is likely sufficient to secure agreement with the most important practical
implications of utilitarianism (stemming from cosmopolitanism, anti-speciesism, and long-termism). Arguments for Consequentialism
Utilitarianism is the paradigmatic form of consequentialism. So one way to support utilitarianism (alongside other consequentialist views) is to
argue in favor of consequentialism more broadly, and against the non-consequentialist alternatives. The remainder of this chapter explores
such arguments. Agency as a Force for Good If some form of consequentialism is true, then we can expect (successful)13 moral agents to have
positive instrumental value: their presence in a situation will tend to make things go better. On non-consequentialist views, by contrast, there is
no such connection between doing the right thing and making things better. Sometimes agents might even be obliged to make things worse
(because the better outcome is only obtainable through making a morally worse choice, such as wrongly killing an innocent person). Insofar as
we are inclined to think that moral agents should be a force for good in the world, that gives us reason to favor consequentialist views. It can be
difficult to resist the general consequentialist principle that more desirable outcomes are more worth bringing about.
Put simply: if you have a choice between bringing about a better outcome or a worse one, surely it would be morally better to choose the
better outcome?14 This argument rests on a conception of action as teleological or goal-directed in nature. The purpose of action, on this view,
is to bring about desired outcomes. Of course, we are not always so deliberate. One may spontaneously sing a song without intending to bring
about any further effect. But it remains plausible that this is a good idea only if the outcome which includes one's singing is better (perhaps
because it is more joyful) than the available alternatives. After all, if remaining silent would somehow save another's life, that would surely
change things. So it is hard to deny that actions are justified to the extent that they bring about things that we ought to want—that is, good
outcomes. On this view, if it would be good for something to happen, then it would be good , all else equal, to
choose this outcome—to make it happen. Consider a "lifeboat" scenario where five people are drowning in one direction, and one
person is drowning in the opposite direction, with not enough time to save everyone. We all agree it would be better if more lives are saved—
for instance, if a lifeboat, floating in the water, were to drift towards the five rather than the one. If we now add a captain to direct the lifeboat,
some non-consequentialists would instead insist that fairness requires the captain to flip a coin to decide which group to save. But that violates
the principle that better outcomes are more worth choosing. It would seem strange to think that giving a fully informed and morally ideal agent
control over a situation could make the outcome worse than if they had not been there at all. But that can sometimes happen on non-
consequentialist accounts, which sometimes require agents to choose (or needlessly risk) worse outcomes. To see this, suppose that (i) the
lifeboat would naturally drift towards the five, if no-one was steering it, and yet (ii) because the captain is steering the boat, fairness requires
him to flip a coin to decide which group to save. If both claims were true, then it would be a bad thing for the world to have the captain steering
the lifeboat, even when he is fully informed and morally ideal. For that would needlessly risk the worse outcome (depending on the flip of the
coin). We would be better off just letting the lifeboat drift naturally towards the five, ensuring the best outcome. But if that is better, then it
seems that a morally ideal agent ought to prefer that, too. This casts doubt on the non-consequentialist claim (ii), above, that fairness requires
the captain to flip a coin and risk a worse outcome. Morally ideal agents should bring about the outcome that they ought to prefer—namely,
the outcome that is overall best. Non-consequentialist views imply that it could be "wrong" to make the world a better place, and "right" to
make it worse. But that seems odd. Worse, it implies that it could be undesirable to have more moral agents making correct decisions. Only
consequentialist views, such as utilitarianism, ensure that it is always morally right to bring about better outcomes, and hence that correct
moral decision-making is a force for good in the world. The Poverty of the Alternatives We have seen that there is a strong presumptive case in
favor of utilitarianism. If no competing view can be shown to be superior, then utilitarianism has a strong claim to be the "default" moral theory
that we should fall back on. It turns out that one of the strongest considerations in favor of utilitarianism (and related consequentialist views) is
the deficiencies of the alternatives. Deontological (or rule-based) theories, in particular, seem to rest on questionable foundations.15
Deontological theories are explicitly non-consequentialist: instead of morally assessing actions by evaluating their consequences, these theories
tend to take certain types of action (such as killing an innocent person) to be intrinsically wrong.16 There are reasons to be dubious of this
approach to ethics, however. The Paradox of Deontology Deontologists hold that there is a constraint against killing: that it is wrong
to kill an innocent person even if this would save five other innocent people from being killed. This verdict can seem puzzling on its face.17
After all, given
how terrible killing is, should we not want there to be less of it ? As Scheffler (1985) argued,
rational choice in general tends to be goal-directed, a conception which fits poorly with deontic constraints.18 A
deontologist might claim that their goal is simply to avoid violating moral constraints themselves, which they can best achieve by not killing
anyone, even if that results in more others being killed. While this explanation can render deontological verdicts coherent, it does so at the cost
of making them seem awfully narcissistic, as though the deontologist's central concern was just to maintain their own moral purity or "clean
hands". Deontologists might push back against this characterization by instead insisting that moral action need not be goal-directed at all.19
Rather than only seeking to promote value (or minimize harm), they claim that moral agents may sometimes be called upon to respect
another's value (by not harming them, even as a means to preventing greater harm to others), which would seem an appropriately outwardly-
directed, non-narcissistic motivation. Scheffler's challenge remains that such a proposal makes moral norms puzzlingly divergent from other
kinds of practical norms. If morality sometimes calls for respecting value rather than promoting it, why is the same not true of prudence? (Given
that pain is bad for you, for example, it would not seem prudent to refuse a painful operation now if the refusal commits you to five
comparably painful operations in future.) Deontologists may offer various answers to this question, but insofar as we are inclined to think, pre-
theoretically, that ethics ought to be continuous with other forms of rational choice, that gives us some reason to prefer consequentialist
accounts. The Hope Objection We earlier suggested that impartial observers should want and hope for the best outcome. Non-
consequentialists claim that nonetheless it is sometimes wrong to bring about the best outcome. Putting the two claims together yields the
striking result that you should sometimes hope that others act wrongly (even when they are fully informed). Suppose it would be wrong for
some stranger—call him Jack—to kill one innocent person to prevent five other (morally comparable) killings. Non-consequentialists may claim
that Jack has a special responsibility to ensure that he does not kill anyone, even if this results in more killings by others. But you are not Jack.
From your perspective as an impartial observer, Jack's killing one innocent person is no more or less intrinsically bad than any of the five other
killings that would thereby be prevented. You have most reason to hope that there is only one killing rather than five. So you have reason to
hope that Jack acts "wrongly" (killing one to save five). But that seems odd. More than merely being odd, this might even be taken to
undermine the claim that deontic constraints matter, or are genuinely important to abide by. After all, to be important just is to be worth caring
about. For example, we should care if others are harmed, which validates the claim that others' interests are morally important. But if we
should not care more about Jack's abiding by the moral constraint against killing than we should about his saving five lives, that would seem to
suggest that the constraint against killing is not in fact more morally important than saving five lives. Finally, since our moral obligations ought
to track what is genuinely morally important, if deontic constraints are not in fact important then we cannot be obligated to abide by them.20
We cannot be obliged to prioritize deontic constraints over others' lives, if we ought to care more about others' lives than about deontic
constraints. So deontic constraints must not accurately describe our obligations after all. Jack really ought to do whatever would do the most
good overall, and so should we. Skepticism About the Doing vs. Allowing Distinction You might wonder: if respect for others requires not
harming them (even to help others more), why does it not equally require not allowing them to be harmed? Deontological moral theories place
great weight on distinctions such as those between doing and allowing harm, or killing and letting die, or intended versus merely foreseen
harms. But why should these be treated so differently? If a victim ends up equally dead either way, whether they were killed or "merely"
allowed to die would not seem to make much difference to them—surely what matters to them is just their death. Indeed, it is far from clear
that there is any robust distinction between "doing" and "allowing". Sometimes you might "do" something by remaining perfectly still.21 Also,
when a doctor unplugs a terminal patient from life support machines, this is typically thought of as "letting die"; but if a mafioso, worried about
an informant's potentially incriminating testimony, snuck in to the hospital and unplugged the informant's life support, we are more likely to
judge it to constitute "killing".22 Bennett (1998) argues at length that there is no satisfactory, fully general distinction between doing and
allowing—at least, none that would vindicate the moral significance that deontologists want to attribute to such a distinction.23 If Bennett is
right, then that might force us towards some form of consequentialism (such as utilitarianism) instead. Status Quo Bias Opposition to
utilitarian trade-offs—that is, benefiting some at a lesser cost to others—amounts to a kind of status quo bias, prioritizing the
preservation of privilege over promoting well-being more generally. Such conservatism might stem from the Just World fallacy: the mistake of
assuming that the status quo is just, and that people naturally get what they deserve. Of course, reality offers no such guarantees of justice.
What circumstances one is born into depends on sheer luck, including one's endowment of physical and cognitive abilities which may pave the
way for future success or failure. Thus, even later in life we never manage to fully wrest back control from the whimsies of fortune and,
consequently, some people are vastly better off than others despite being no more deserving. In such cases, why should we not be willing to
benefit one person at a lesser cost to privileged others? They have no special entitlement to the extra well-being that fortune has granted
them.24 Clearly, it is good for people to be well-off, and we certainly would not want to harm anyone unnecessarily.25 However, if we can
increase overall well-being by benefiting one person at the lesser cost to another, we should not refrain from doing so merely due to a
prejudice in favor of the existing distribution.26 It is easy to see why traditional elites would want to promote a "morality" which favors their
entrenched interests. It is less clear why others should go along with such a distorted view of what (and who) matters. It can similarly be argued
that there is no real distinction between imposing harms and withholding benefits . The only difference between
the two cases concerns what we understand to be the status quo, which lacks moral significance. Suppose scenario A is better for someone
than B. Then to shift from A to B would be a "harm", while to prevent a shift from B to A would be to "withhold a benefit". But this is merely a
descriptive difference. If we deny that the historically given starting point provides a morally privileged baseline, then we must say that the cost
in either case is the same, namely the difference in well-being between A and B. In principle, it should not matter where we start from.27 Now
suppose that scenario B is vastly better for someone else than A is: perhaps it will save their life, at the cost of the first person's arm. Nobody
would think it okay to kill a person just to save another's arm (that is, to shift from B to A). So if we are to avoid status quo bias, we must
similarly judge that it would be wrong to oppose the shift from A to B—that is, we should not object to saving someone's life at the cost of
another's arm.28 We should not care especially about preserving the privilege of whoever stood to benefit by default; such conservatism is not
truly fair or just. Instead, our goal should be to bring about whatever outcome would be best overall, counting everyone equally, just as
utilitarianism prescribes. Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Against these powerful theoretical objections, the main consideration that
deontological theories have going for them is closer conformity with our intuitions about particular cases. But if these intuitions cannot be
supported by independently plausible principles, that may undermine their force—or suggest that we should interpret these intuitions as good
rules of thumb for practical guidance, rather than as indicating what fundamentally matters. The force of deontological intuitions may also be
undermined if it can be demonstrated that they result from an unreliable process. For example, evolutionary processes may have endowed us
with an emotional bias favoring those who look, speak, and behave like ourselves; this, however, offers no justification for discriminating
against those unlike ourselves. Evolution is a blind, amoral process whose only "goal" is the propagation of genes, not the promotion of well-
being or moral rightness. Our moral intuitions require scrutiny, especially in scenarios very different from our evolutionary environment. If we
identify a moral intuition as stemming from our evolutionary ancestry, we may decide not to give much weight to it in our moral reasoning—
the practice of evolutionary debunking.29 Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer argue that views permitting partiality are especially
susceptible to evolutionary debunking, whereas impartial views like utilitarianism are more likely to result from undistorted reasoning.30
Joshua Greene offers a different psychological debunking argument. He argues that deontological
judgments—for instance, in
response to trolley cases—tend to stem from unreliable and inconsistent emotional responses , including our favoritism
of identifiable over faceless victims and our aversion to harming someone up close rather than from afar. By contrast, utilitarian judgments
involve the more deliberate application of widely respected moral principles.31 Such debunking arguments raise worries about whether they
"prove too much": after all, the foundational moral judgment that pain is bad would itself seem emotionally-laden and susceptible to
evolutionary explanation—physically vulnerable creatures would have powerful evolutionary reasons to want to avoid pain whether or not it
was objectively bad, after all! However, debunking arguments may be most applicable in cases where we feel that a principled explanation for
the truth of the judgment is lacking. We do not tend to feel any such lack regarding the badness of pain—that is surely an intrinsically plausible
judgment if anything is. Some intuitions may be over-determined: explicable by both evolutionary causes and by their rational merits. In such a
case, we need not take the evolutionary explanation to undermine the judgment, because the judgment also results from a reliable process
(namely, rationality). By contrast, deontological principles and partiality are far less self-evidently justified, and so may be considered more
vulnerable to debunking. Once we have an explanation for these psychological intuitions that can explain why we would have them even if they
were rationally baseless, we may be more justified in concluding that they are indeed rationally baseless.
 Evidence for P2
Humanity will create infinite lab universes
Tomasik 17 Brian Tomasik, 6-16-2017, "Lab Universes: Creating Infinite Suffering," Reducing Suffering.Org, https://reducing-
suffering.org/lab-universes-creating-infinite-suffering/

There's a small but non-negligible probability that humans or their descendants will create infinitely many new
universes in a laboratory. This would cause infinitely many additional instances of the Holocaust,
infinitely many acts of torture, and worse. Creating lab universes would be very bad according to several ethical views.
Contents Summary Background on lab universes Infinite suffering Cosmic evil How likely is this scenario? Is universe creation physically possible? Would our
descendants have reason to create lab universes? Manipulating constants? Does the raw number of universes matter? Cosmological natural selection Is it possible
to reduce universe production? Other universes in a lab Pages That Link Here Acknowledgments Footnotes Background on lab universes Some physical theories
predict that it
may be possible to create new, "baby" universes out of a small amount of matter . Technical
reviews of the topic can be found in Stefano Ansoldi and Eduardo I. Guendelman, " Child Universes in
the Laboratory," and Gordon McCabe, "How to Create a Universe." Popular-level introductions
include the following: Jim Holt, "The Big Lab Experiment," Slate, 2004 Zeeya Merali, "Create Your Own
Universe," New Scientist, 2006 Robert Krulwich, "Build Your Own Universe," NPR, 2006. McCabe
explained the concept clearly (p. 6): Now, one of the most intriguing possibilities opened up by inflation, is the possible creation of a universe
'in a laboratory'. Creation in a laboratory is taken to mean the creation of a physical universe, by design, using the 'artificial' means available to an intelligent species.
It is the ability of inflation to maintain a constant energy density, in combination with a period of exponential expansion, which is the key to these laboratory
creation scenarios. The idea is to use a small amount of matter in the laboratory, and induce it to undergo inflation until its volume is comparable to that of our own
observable universe. The energy density of the inflating region remains constant, and because it becomes the energy density of a huge region, the inflating region
acquires a huge total (non-gravitational) energy. Andrei Linde, one of the founders of inflationary cosmology, put it this way (p. 8): Indeed, one may need to have
only a milligram of matter in a vacuum-like exponentially expanding state, and then the process of self-reproduction will create from this matter not one universe
but infinitely many! Another pioneer of inflation is Alan Guth, the subject of a 1987 New York Times article: PHYSICISTS often probe the workings of nature on a
cosmic scale, but Prof. Alan H. Guth and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have set themselves the ultimate research goal. They are
seeking a mechanism by which humans might create a new universe from scratch. Outrageous though such a notion may be, Dr. Guth and his collaborators are
perfectly serious about their investigation. "Ten years ago, we couldn't even have posed the question of whether a man-made universe would be possible," he said.
"But physics has progressed a long way since then, and today we can ask this and related questions in the real hope of finding scientifically testable answers. We are
working in a new and exciting environment." In his 1997 book, The Inflationary Universe (pp. 268-69), Guth wrote: To put the story in perspective, one should
remember that the process of eternal inflation [postulated by the theory of the self-reproducing inflationary universe ...] leads to an exponential increase in the
number of pocket universes on time scales as short as 10 -37 seconds. Since the time needed for the development of a super-advanced civilization is measured in
billions of years or more, there appears to be no chance that laboratory production of universes could compete with the "natural" process of eternal inflation. On
the other hand, a child universe created in a laboratory by a super-advanced civilization would set into motion its own progression of eternal inflation. Could the
super-advanced civilization find a way to enhance its efficiency? We may have to wait a few billion years to find out. Infinite suffering Starting a chain of
eternal inflation in the laboratory would produce infinitely many new universes. But what types of universes would emerge? Suppose we assume—as do Jaume
Garriga and Alex Vilenkin in their 2001 article "Many worlds in one"—that there are only finitely many possible universe histories of a particular duration (say, 13.7
billion years, the age of our universe); call these "histories" for short. The existence of infinitely many universes needn't, in general, imply the existence of all
possible histories. As Alex Vilenkin notes in his 2006 book Many Worlds in One, the sequence 1, 3, 5, 7, ... contains infinitely many integers but doesn't contain all
possible integers, and one might imagine an analogous situation for universe histories (p. 114). However, because "the initial conditions at the big bang are set by
random quantum processes during inflation" (p. 114), the theory of inflation does imply that lab universes would instantiate all possible histories infinitely many
times (with probability one—see the second Borel-Cantelli lemma). This would, of course, include infinitely many replications of the Holocaust, infinitely many acts
of torture, and so on. Indeed, there would be infinitely many universes in which Hitler won World War II, as well as infinitely many
universes that would be as close as physically possible to "hell on earth " (or on any other planet). The assumption of finitely
many possible histories is not really important. As long as we assume that the probability is greater than zero that suffering will emerge in a random universe,
creating infinitely many universes would create infinite amounts of suffering. Cosmic evil There are many moral principles suggesting that creating lab universes
would be wrong: "Never again": Lab universes would, among other things, contain infinitely many repetitions of the Holocaust. Would your conscience be okay with
carrying out the Holocaust infinitely many times? Problem of evil: What kind of a good god would create a world like ours with so much suffering? And yet, if we
created lab universes, we would be doing just that—as well as creating worlds much worse than our own. Think about a person in one of the universes that future
humans might create whose skin is being burned off as part of her torture prior to death. In between screams, she asks: "Why God? Why?" What would be our
answer to her? Ends don't justify means: Even if future humans want to create lab universes because of the happiness and beauty they would contain, this doesn't
justify the necessary co-creation of infinitely many people being tortured. Asymmetric population ethics: It's more wrong to create a life that suffers than fail to
create one that's happy. Other: Prioritarianism, non-positive-focused utilitarianism, wrongness of "playing god." Nonetheless, I am afraids that potential
creators of lab universes would fail to heed these concerns. They might view their project as "cool" or "groundbreaking" without
thinking hard about the consequences that playing around with physics would have on real organisms. (In a similar way, few people reflect upon the massive
universe creators would have
amounts of expected suffering in the universe when they learn about cosmology.) I fear that, because potential

lived generally happy lives—never having been brutally tortured, eaten alive, or slaughtered while
conscious—they would be less sensitive to how bad pain can really be. In general, the lives of humans are far better than
the lives of almost all other animals, so even if the would-be universe creators deferred the decision as to whether to create lab universes to the volition of
humanity as a whole, that the decision might be biased against giving weight to suffering. According to this excerpt, Zeeya Merali writes in A Big Bang in a Little
Room: The Quest to Create New Universes (2017):
 Evidence for P3
Suffering across infinite new universes drastically outweighs the well-being across
infinite universes, most universes will never have life that advances past a Hobbesian
nightmare
Pearce 08 Quantum Ethics? David Pearce (2008, last updated 2015) Suffering in the Multiverse
https://www.abolitionist.com/multiverse.html

The tenor of this narrative would be contested by many non-utilitarians. Why focus exclusively on suffering? Lighten up! There is so much more
to life. Why not think about life's joys? Temperamental optimists will tend to have mood-congruent thoughts about the plenitude of
unsuspected wonders that modern physics' expanded vision of Reality entails rather than focus on the nasty side of existence. But if you are an
ethical utilitarian, then the relative importance of anything isn't a mere subjective value-judgement but a matter of objective fact, written into
the fabric of the world. Extreme emotional intensity of experience morally matters most. Since the extremes of suffering dwarf the
mundane pleasures of Darwinian life, they should presumably dominate any narrative outline of its
features. And Darwinian life is statistically far more common in the Multiverse than post-Darwinian
life. A classical utilitarian might respond that it is more appropriate to focus on the unimaginable glories of our superhappy descendants
rather than dwelling on the nastiness of Darwinian life. Yes, branches supporting such sublime superhappiness may be
unrepresentative of sentience in the Multiverse as a whole - though the numbers become complicated if
superintelligence hypothetically converts the accessible universe into blissful computronium. But
assuming that the intensity of well-being of posthuman superbliss will surpass the comparatively dim
awareness of ancestral minds, possibly by several orders of magnitude, then such superbliss matters far
more than dim Darwinian consciousness too. As a consequence, posthuman superbliss should dominate
our narrative. Analogously, any history of contemporary life on Earth should focus, not on its inordinate number of beetles, but on human
beings. The negative utilitarian, for whom minimising suffering is the absolute moral priority, will of course find such a response unsatisfactory.
There is nothing dim about Darwinian consciousness if, say, you are a grieving parent who has just lost a child. Or, more prosaically, if you have
a toothache. This discussion contains a controversial assumption which if confounded will make the story sketched here even darker. The
controversial assumption is that when intelligent agents have attained the technical means to abolish the biological substrates of suffering, they
will almost invariably do so. Thus by implication, suffering will be abolished in the great preponderance of branches where humans [or their
functional counterparts] decipher their own genetic source code and develop biotechnology. A subsequent cross-branch reproductive
revolution of designer babies is effectively inevitable. This generalisation might seem an extraordinarily reckless prediction. Forecasting is
perilous enough even if one is a classical one-worlder. So predicting that a highly speculative scenario (i.e. the abolition of suffering) will
eventually play out in the vast bulk of branches of macroscopic worlds with inhabitants attaining our level of technological development - and
conversely, predicting that only a vanishingly small density of such branches will retain suffering indefinitely - might seem foolhardy in the
extreme. Perhaps so. Recall how opiophobia still retards the medical treatment of even "physical" pain. Yet let's suppose instead that the
analogy with anaesthetics holds up. After the discovery of general anaesthesia, its surgical use was contentious for a decade or two. But pain-
free surgery soon became universally accepted. In our current state of ignorance, there is no way we can rigorously calculate the probability
density of branches of the Multiverse where anaesthesia was discovered and rejected. But at worst, it's fair to say the proportion of branches is
extremely small. Branches where governments outlaw pain-free surgery aren't sociologically credible. Of course the abolition of psychological
distress is a less clear-cut case than anaesthesia. Technologies to abolish mental pain are in their infancy. But let's assume that in future they
can be made as technically clean and successful as surgical anaesthesia. In what proportion of such branches will some or all people reject
mental superhealth indefinitely? Again, a case can be made (though it won't be attempted here) that the proportion will be vanishingly small.
Unfortunately, the
proportion of life-supporting branches of the Multiverse whose dominant species
reaches this stage of technical development is extremely small too. So the anticipated local success of
the abolitionist project touted here is not as wonderful news as it sounds.

Wild animal suffering means the expected amount of suffering caused by a new
universe is negative and means extinction in this universe is good
Tomasik 17 The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering by Brian Tomasik First written: July 2009; Last edited: 13 Feb. 2017
https://foundational-research.org/the-importance-of-wild-animal-suffering/

One can advance some argument that evolution should avoid making animal lives excessively horrifying for extended periods prior to death
because doing so might, at least in more complex species, induce PTSD, depression, or other debilitating side-effects. Of course, we see
empirically that evolution does induce such disorders when traumatic incidents happen, like exposure to a predator. But there's probably some
kind of reasonable bound on how bad these can be most of the time if animals are to remain functional. Death itself is a different matter
because, once it reaches the point of inevitability, evolutionary pressures don't constrain the emotional experience. Death
can be as
good as painless (for a few lucky animals) or as bad as torture (for many others). Evolution has no reason to prevent
death from feeling unbearably awful. [Dawkins] Death by Other Means Of course, predation is not the only way in which organisms die painfully.
Animals are also stricken by diseases and parasites , which may induce listlessness, shivering, ulcers, pneumonia, starvation,
violent behavior, or other gruesome symptoms over the course of days or weeks leading up to death. Avian salmonellosis is just one example:
Signs range from sudden death to gradual onset of depression over 1 to 3 days, accompanied by huddling of the birds, fluffed-up feathers,
unsteadiness, shivering, loss of appetite, markedly increased or absence of thirst, rapid loss of weight, accelerated respiration and watery
yellow, green or blood-tinged droppings. The vent feathers become matted with excreta, the eyes begin to close and, immediately before death,
animals
some birds show apparent blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremors, convulsions or other nervous signs. [Salmonellosis] Still other
die of accidents, dehydration during a summer drought, or lack of food during the winter. For instance, 2006 was a harsh year on
bats in Placerville, California: "You can see their ribs, their backbones, and (the area) where the intestine and the stomach are is completely sunk
through to the back," said Dharma Webber, founder of the California Native Bat Conservancy. [...] She said emerging mosquitoes aren't enough
to feed the creatures. "It would be like us eating a little piece of popcorn here or there," she said. [bats] (Of course, when the bats do have food,
this isn't good news for their prey....) Even ice storms can be fatal: "Birds unable to find a sheltered perch during the storm may have their feet
frozen to a branch or their wings covered in ice making them unable to fly. Grouse buried in snow drifts are often encased by the ice layer and
suffocate."[Heidorn] A Hard Life While death may often constitute the peak of suffering during an animal's life, day-to-day existence isn't
necessarily pleasant either. Unlike most humans in the industrialized world, wild animals don't have immediate access to food whenever they
become hungry. They must constantly seek out water and shelter while remaining on the lookout for predators. Unlike us, most animals can't
go inside when it rains or turn on the heat when winter temperatures drop far below their usual levels. In summary: It is often assumed that
wild animals live in a kind of natural paradise and that it is only the appearance and intervention of human agencies that bring about suffering.
This essentially Rousseauian view is at odds with the wealth of information derived from field studies of animal populations. Scarcity of food and
water, predation, disease and intraspecific aggression are some of the factors which have been identified as normal parts of a wild environment
which cause suffering in wild animals on a regular basis. [UCLA, p. 24] And while many animals appear to endure such conditions rather calmly, this
doesn't necessarily mean they aren't suffering.[BourneEtAl] Sick and injured members of a prey species are the easiest to catch, so predators
deliberately target these individuals. As a consequence, those prey that appear sick or injured will be the ones killed most often. Thus,
evolutionary pressure pushes prey species to avoid drawing attention to their suffering.[Nuffield, ch. 4.12, p. 66] Based on studies of stress-hormone
levels in domestic and wild animals, Christie Wilcox[Wilcox] concluded that "if we follow the guidelines of care that provide food, water, comfort,
and necessary items for behavioral expression, domesticated animals are not only likely to be as happy as their wild relatives, they're probably
happier." She also observed: So the real question becomes whether a domesticated or captive animal is more, less, or as happy in the moment
as its wild counterpart. There are a few key conditions that are classically thought to lead to a "happy" animal by reducing undue stress. These
are the basis for most animal cruelty regulations, including those in the US and UK. They include that animals have the 'rights' to: - Enough food
and water - Comfortable conditions (temperature, etc) - Expression of normal behavior When it comes to wild animals, though, only the last is
guaranteed. They have to struggle to survive on a daily basis, from finding food and water to another individual to mate with. They don't have
the right to comfort, stability, or good health. [...] By the standards our governments have set, the life of a wild animal is cruelty. Short Lifespans
In nature, the most populous animals are probably the ones that are generally worst off. Small mammals and birds have adult
lifespans at most one or three years before they face a painful death. And many insects count their time on Earth in weeks
rather than years -- for instance, just 2-4 weeks for the horn fly. [Cumming]
I personally would prefer not to exist than to find
myself born as an insect, struggle to navigate the world for a few weeks, and then die of dehydration or
be caught in a spider's web. Worse still might be finding myself entangled in an Amazonian-ant "torture rack" trap for 12 hours, [BBC] or being
eaten alive over the course of weeks by an Ichneumon wasp.[Gould, pp. 32-44] (That said, whether caterpillars eaten by Ichneumon wasps feel pain
during the experience is unclear.)
It's true that scientists remain uncertain whether insects experience pain in a
form that we would consider conscious suffering. [insect-pain] However, the fact that there remains
serious debate on the issue suggests that we should not rule out the possibility . And seeing as insects
number 10^18,[Williams] with the number of copepods in the ocean of a similar magnitude,[SchubelButman] the
mathematical "expected value" (probability times amount) of their suffering is vast. I should note that the force of this
point would be lessened if, as may be the case, an animal's "intensity" or "degree" of emotional experience depends to some rough extent on
the amount of neural tissue it has devoted to pain signals. More Offspring Than Survive Tables of animal lifespans typically show durations of
survival by adult members of a species. However, most
individuals die much sooner, before reaching maturity. This is a
simple consequence of the fact that females give birth to far more offspring than can survive to reproduce in a
stable population. For instance, while humans can produce only one child per reproductive season (excepting twins), the number is 1-22
offspring for dogs (Canis familiaris), 4-6 eggs for the starling (Sturmus vulgaris), 6,000-20,000 eggs for the bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana), and 2
million eggs for the scallop (Argopecten irradians).[SolbrigSolbrig, p. 37] Take a look at this figure from Thomas J. Herbert's article[Herbert] on r and K
selection illustrating extremely high infant mortality for "r strategists." Most small animals like minnows and insects are r strategists. Granted,
it's unclear whether all of these species are sentient -- and even more regarding that fraction of the eggs that fails to hatch (see the next
section) -- but again, in expected-value terms, the amount of expected suffering is enormous. This strategy of "making lots of copies and hoping
a few come out" may be perfectly sensible from the standpoint of evolution, but the cost to the individual organisms is tremendous. Matthew
Clarke and Yew-Kwang Ng conclude from an analysis of the welfare implications of population dynamics that "The number of offspring of a
species that maximizes fitness may lead to suffering and is different from the number that maximizes welfare (average or total)." [ClarkeNg, sec. 4] And
in a related paper, "Towards Welfare Biology: Evolutionary Economics of Animal Consciousness and Suffering," Ng concludes from the excess of
offspring over adult survivors: "Under the assumptions of concave and symmetrical functions relating costs to enjoyment and suffering,
evolutionary economizing results in the excess of total suffering over total enjoyment." [Ng, p. 272] In his famous paper, "Animal liberation and
environmental ethics: Bad marriage, quick divorce," [Sagoff] Mark Sagoff quotes the following passage from Fred Hapgood:[Hapgood] All species
reproduce in excess, way past the carrying capacity of their niche. In her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a
mouse, 1000 kits; a trout, 20,000 fry, a tuna or cod, a million fry or more; [...] and an oyster, perhaps a hundred million spat. If one assumes that
the population of each of these species is, from generation to generation, roughly equal, then on average only one offspring will
survive to replace each parent. All the other thousands and millions will die , one way or another.1 Sagoff goes on
to say: "The misery of animals in nature--which humans can do much to relieve--makes every other form of suffering
pale in comparison. Mother Nature is so cruel to her children she makes Frank Perdue look like a saint." When Do Babies Become
Sentient? The previous section explained that in r-selected species, parents may have hundreds or even tens of thousands of offspring, and
almost all of these die shortly after birth. But some questions remain. What fraction of these offspring were sentient at the time of death, and
what fraction merely died as unconscious eggs or larvae? EFSA's "Aspects of the biology and welfare of animals used for experimental and other
scientific purposes" (pp. 37-42) explores when fetuses of various species begin to feel conscious pain. [EFSA] The paper notes that the age of onset
of consciousness varies based on whether a species is precocial (well developed at birth, such as horses) or altricial (still developing at birth,
such as marsupials). Precocial animals are more likely to feel pain at earlier ages. Also relevant is whether the species is viviparous (having live
birth) or oviparous (giving birth through eggs). Viviparous animals have greater need to inhibit fetal consciousness during development in order
to prevent injury to the mother and siblings. Oviparous animals that are constrained by shells have less need for inhibition of awareness before
birth. (p. 38) For this reason, the report suggests: "If awareness is the criterion for protection, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and cephalopods
may, therefore, be more obviously in need of protection pre-hatching than mammals are in need of protection pre-partum." (p. 38) For
example: "Sensory and neural development in a precocial bird such as the domestic chick is very well advanced several days before hatching.
Controlled movements and coordinated behavioural and electrophysiological evoked responses to tactile, auditory and visual stimuli appear
three or four days before hatching occurs after 21 days of incubation (Broom, 1981)." (p. 39) In contrast: "Even though the mammalian fetus
can show physical responses to external stimuli, the weight of present evidence suggests that consciousness does not occur in the fetus until it
is delivered and starts to breathe air." (p. 42) Thus, it seems clear that many animals are able to suffer by the time of birth
if not before. The stage of development at which this risk [of suffering] is sufficient for protection to be necessary is that at which the
normal locomotion and sensory functioning of an individual independent of the egg or mother can occur. For air-breathing animals this time will
not generally be later than that at which the fetus could survive unassisted outside the uterus or egg. For most vertebrate animals, the stage of
development at which there is a risk of poor welfare when a procedure is carried out on them is the beginning of the last third of development
within the egg or mother. For a fish, amphibian, cephalopod, or decapod it is when it is capable of feeding independently rather than being
dependent on the food supply from the egg. [...] (p. 3) Most amphibians and fish have larval forms which are not well developed at hatching but
develop rapidly with experience of independent life[.] Those fish and amphibians that are well developed at hatching or viviparous birth and all
cephalopods, since these are small but well developed at hatching, will have had a functioning nervous system and the potential for awareness
for some time before hatching. (p. 38) Another consideration suggestive of pain before birth is the fact that many oviparous vertebrates can
hatch early in response to environmental stimuli, including vibrations that feel like a predator. For example, for skink eggs: "Simulated
predation experiments in the field induced hatching in both nest sites (horizontal rock crevices) and in eggs displaced from nest sites. The
hatching process was explosive: early hatching embryos hatched in seconds and sprinted from the egg an average of 40 cm as they
hatched."[DoodyPaull] Early hatching has also been documented for amphibians, fish, and invertebrates.[DoodyPaull] Young fish are already intelligent
enough to be predators a few days after birth: "In the Sacramento-San Joaquin Estuary, young striped bass begin feeding on small crustacean
zooplankton a few days after they hatch (Eldridge et al. 1982)." [StevensEtAl, pp. 21-22] Unfortunately, huge numbers of striped bass die young, given that
"the average female striped bass produc[es] nearly a half million eggs". [StevensEtAl, p. 20] These points suggest that a significant fraction of the large
numbers of offspring born to r-selected species may very well be conscious during the pain of their deaths after a few short days, or even hours,
of life. Misjudging Levels of Well-Being? There is a danger in extrapolating the welfare of wild animals from our own imagination of how we
would feel in the situation. We can imagine immense discomfort were we to sleep through a cold winter night's storm with only a sweatshirt to
keep us warm, but many animals have better fur coats and can often find some sort of shelter. More generally, it seems unlikely that species
would gain an adaptive advantage by feeling constant hardship, since stress does entail a metabolic cost.[Ng] Also, r-selected animals might
suffer less from a given injury than long-lived animals would because r-selected creatures have less to lose by taking big short-term risks. [Tomasik-
short-lived]
That said, we should also be wary of underestimating the extent and severity of wild-animal suffering due to our own biases. You, the
reader, are probably in the comfort of a climate-controlled building or vehicle, with a relatively full stomach, and without fear of attack. Most of
us in the industrialized West go through life in a relatively euthymic state, and it's easy to assume that the general pleasantness with which life
greets us is shared by most other people and animals. When we think about nature, we may picture chirping songbirds or frolicking gazelles,
rather than deer having their flesh chewed off while conscious or immobilized raccoons afflicted by roundworms. And of course, all of the
previous examples, insofar as they involve large land animals, reflect my human tendency toward the "availability heuristic": In fact, the most
prevalent wild animals of all are small organisms, many ocean-dwelling. When we think "wild animals," we should (if we adopt the expected-
value approach to uncertainty about sentience) picture ants, copepods, and tiny fish, rather than lions or gazelles. People may not accurately
assess at a single instant how they'll feel overall during a longer period of time.[KahnemanSugden] They often exhibit "rosy prospection" toward future
events and "rosy retrospection" about the past, in which they assume that their previous and future levels of wellbeing were and will be better
than what's reported at the time of the experiences. [MitchellThompson] Moreover, even when organisms do correctly judge their hedonic levels, they
often show a "will to live" quite apart from pleasure or pain. Animals that, in the face of lives genuinely not worth living, decide to end their
existence tend not to reproduce very successfully. Ultimately, though, regardless of exactly how good or bad we assess life in the wild to be on
balance, it remains undeniable that many animals in nature endure some dreadful experiences. If Life in Nature is so Bad, Why Don't Wild
Animals Kill Themselves? Don't understand suicide: It may be that most animals (except the smartest mammals and birds?), while conscious
emotionally, don't understand death. As an analogy, when I have a nightmare, I feel bad, but I don't fully realize I'm dreaming and am not
sufficiently in control of the situation that I can end the nightmare at will. I guess non-dreaming animals do have more control over their
physical state than I do when asleep, but the point is that you can have emotions without understanding life and death. Little to be gained
when most suffering comes from death anyway: Animals don't have painless ways to kill themselves. For many animals, I think most of the total
pain of their lives comes from dying. For example, many of the hundreds of offspring of a beetle mother will die within a few days or weeks of
hatching. I think their lives up to the point of death might hover around being neutral between pain and happiness, so there's not much to be
gained by early suicide. Temporal discounting: An animal often fails to act in its long-term hedonic interest due to short-sightedness. Even if
suicide were optimal, the animal might not kill itself because doing so would be painful in the short run. (For example, when very nauseous, it
may feel better to vomit immediately than to endure nausea for two hours going forward, but I can never muster up the courage to vomit.)
Non-hedonic "will to live": I think animals have a "will to live" that's partly separate from their hedonic well-being. Animal behaviors are
integrations of huge numbers of signals and brain systems, so it's not surprising that some of these systems act contrary to the hedonic-
welfare-maximization systems. If animals did not have a “will to live”, presumably they would not survive as effectively. Few suicides on factory
farms: If animals do kill themselves when their lives are not worth living, why don't we see more suicides on factory farms? Perhaps at least
battery-cage hens would be better off killing themselves? (That said, Howie Lempel pointed out to me that maybe caged animals are less able
to hurt themselves than free animals.) Big animals may have decent lives: I think the animals that potentially could contemplate suicide
(chimpanzees??) likely do have lives worth living a good amount of the time. Finally, there are some claims that animals do commit suicide,
though others are doubtful. I'm personally skeptical because there aren't lots of well documented cases of animal suicide, and it's easy to
accumulate folklore about phenomena that aren't real. That said, I don't doubt that some animals act differently when suffering an emotional
loss. But Can Humans Reduce Wild-Animal Suffering? Why, then, is the suffering of wild animals not a top priority for animal advocates? One
reason is philosophical: Some feel that while humans have duties to treat well the animals that they use or live with, they have no responsibility
to those outside their sphere of interaction. I find this unsatisfying; if we really care about animals because we don't want fellow organisms to
suffer brutally -- not just because we want to "keep our moral house clean" -- then it shouldn't matter whether we have a personal connection
with wild animals or not. Other philosophers agree with this but continue to defend human inaction by claiming that people are ultimately
helpless to change the situation. When asked whether we should stop lions from eating gazelles, Peter Singer replied: [...] for practical purposes
I am fairly sure, judging from man's past record of attempts to mold nature to his own aims, that we would be more likely to increase the net
amount of animal suffering if we interfered with wildlife, than to decrease it. Lions play a role in the ecology of their habitat, and we cannot be
sure what the long-term consequences would be if we were to prevent them from killing gazelles. [...] So, in practice, I would definitely say that
wildlife should be left alone.[Singer] I would point out in response to Singer that most human interventions have not been designed to improve
wild-animal welfare, and even so, I suspect that many of them have decreased wild-animal suffering on balance by reducing habitats. In a
similar vein as Singer, Jennifer Everett suggested that consequentialists may endorse evolutionary selection because it eliminates deleterious
genetic traits: [...] if propagation of the "fittest" genes contributes to the integrity of both predator and prey species, which is good for the
predator/prey balance in the ecosystem, which in turn is good for the organisms living in it, and so on, then the very ecological relationships that
holistic environmentalists regard as intrinsically valuable will be valued by animal welfarists because they conduce ultimately, albeit indirectly
and via complex causal chains, to the well-being of individual animals. [Everett, p. 48] These authors are right that consideration of long-range
ecological side-effects is important. However, it does not follow that humans have no obligations regarding wild animals or that animal
supporters should remain silent about nature's cruelty. The next few subsections elaborate on ways in which humans can indeed do something
about wild-animal suffering. Humans Already Impact Nature I agree that we should be cautious about quick-fix intervention. Ecology is
extremely complicated, and humans have a long track record of underestimating the number of unanticipated consequences they will
encounter in trying to engineer improvements to nature. On the other hand, there are many instances in which we are already interfering with
wildlife in some manner. As Tyler Cowen observed:[Cowen, p. 10] In other cases we are interfering with nature, whether we like it or not. It is not a
question of uncertainty holding us back from policing, but rather how to compare one form of policing to another. Humans change water levels,
fertilize particular soils, influence climatic conditions, and do many other things that affect the balance of power in nature. These human
activities will not go away any time soon, but in the meantime we need to evaluate their effects on carnivores and their victims. One such
evaluation was actually carried out regarding an Australian government decision to cull overpopulated and starving kangaroos at an Australian
Defense Force army base.[ClarkeNg] While admittedly crude and theoretical, the analysis proves that the tools of welfare economics can be
combined with the principles of population ecology to reach nontrivial conclusions about how human interference with wildlife affects
aggregate animal well-being. Consider another example. Humans spray 3 billion tons of pesticides per year, [Pimentel] and whether or not we think
this causes more wild-animal suffering than it prevents, large-scale insecticide use is, to some extent, a fait accompli of modern society. If,
hypothetically, scientists could develop ways to make these chemicals act more quickly or less painfully, enormous numbers of insects and
larger organisms could be given slightly less agonizing deaths. (Note that pesticides might actually prevent net insect suffering if they reduce
insect populations enough, so encouraging humane insecticides is not equivalent to encouraging less pesticide use. Indeed, organic farms may
contain high amounts of insect suffering, both because of higher total fauna populations and because organic pest-control methods may be
quite painful. I remain very uncertain on this question, though.)[Tomasik-insecticides] Human changes to the environment -- through agriculture,
urbanization, deforestation, pollution, climate change, and so on -- have huge consequences, both negative and positive, for wild animals. For
instance, "paving paradise [or, rather, hell?] to put up a parking lot" prevents the existence of animals that would otherwise have lived there.
Even where habitats are not destroyed, humans may change the composition of species living in them. If, say, an invasive species has a shorter
lifespan and more non-surviving offspring than the native counterpart, the result would be more total suffering. Of course, the opposite could
just as easily be the case. Caring about wild-animal suffering should not be mistaken as general support for environmental preservation; indeed,
in some or even many cases, preventing existence may be the most humane option. Consequentialist vegetarians ought
not find this line of reasoning unusual: The utilitarian argument against factory farming is precisely that, e.g., a
broiler hen would be better off not existing than suffering in cramped conditions for 45 days before
slaughter. Of course, even in the calculation of whether to adopt a vegetarian diet, the impacts on animals in the wild can be important and
sometimes dominant over the direct effects on livestock themselves. [MathenyChan]

Preventing infinite new universes outweighs

Vinding 17, 2017/12/01, "Suffering, Infinity, and Universe Anti-Natalism," Magnus Vinding,
https://magnusvinding.com/2017/12/01/suffering-infinity-and-universe-anti-natalism/Universe Anti-Natalism: The Most Important Cause?

It is therefore not unthinkable that this should be the main question of concern for consequentialists : how does this impact the
creation of new universes? Or, similarly, that trying to impact future universe generation should be the main cause for aspiring effective altruists. And I would argue
that the form this cause should take is universe anti-natalism: avoiding, or minimizing, the creation of new universes. There are countless ways to argue for this. As
Brian Tomasik notes, creating a new universe that in turn gives rise to infinitely many universes “would cause infinitely many additional instances of the Holocaust,
infinitely many acts of torture, and worse. Creating lab universes would be very bad according to several ethical views.” Such universe
creation would
obviously be wrong from the stance of negative utilitarianism , as well as from similar suffering-focused views. It would also be
wrong according to what is known as The Asymmetry in population ethics: that creating beings with bad lives is wrong, and something we have an obligation to not
do, while failing to create happy lives is not wrong, and we have no obligation to bring such lives into being. A much weaker, and even less controversial, stance on
procreative ethics could also be used: do not create lives with infinite amounts of torture. Indeed, how, we must ask ourselves, could a benevolent being justify
bringing so much suffering into being? What could possibly justify the Holocaust, let alone infinitely many of them? What would be our answer to the screams of
“why” to the heavens from the torture victims? Universe anti-natalism should also be taken seriously by classical utilitarians, as a case can be made that the

universe is likely to end up being net negative in terms of algo-hedonic tone. For instance, it may well be that most
sentient life that will ever exist will find itself in a state of natural carnage, as civilizations may be rare even on planets where
sentient life has emerged, and because even where civilizations have emerged, it may be that they are unlikely to be sustainable, perhaps overwhelmingly so,
implying that most sentient life might be expected to exist at the stage it has existed on for the entire history of sentient life on Earth. A stage where sentient
beings are born in great numbers only for the vast majority of them to die shortly thereafter, for instance
due to starvation or by being eaten alive, which is most likely a net negative condition, even by wishful classical
utilitarian standards. Simon Knutsson’s essay How Could an Empty World Be Better than a Populated One? is worth reading in this context, and of
course applies to “no world” as well. And if one takes a so-called meta-normative approach, where one decides by averaging over various ethical theories, one could
argue that the case against universe creation becomes significantly stronger; if one for instance combines an unclear or negative-leaning verdict from a classical
utilitarian stance with The Asymmetry and Kantian ethics. As for those who hold anti-natalism at the core of their values, one could argue that they should make
universe anti-natalism their main focus over human anti-natalism (which may not even reduce suffering in expectation), or at the very least expand their focus to
also encompass this, apparently esoteric position. Not only because the scale is potentially unsurpassable in terms of what prevents the most births, but it may also
be easier, both because wishful thinking about “those horrors will not befall my creation” could be more difficult to maintain in the face of horrors that we know
have occurred in the past, and because we do not seem as attached and adapted, biologically and culturally, to creating new universes as we are to creating new
children. And just as anti-natalists argue with respect to human life, being against the creation of new universes need not be incompatible with a responsible
sustainment of life in the one that does exist. This might also be a compromise solution that many people would be able to agree on.

A new universe is infinitely bad

Huemer 19 Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the
author of more than seventy academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and
political philosophy, as well as eight amazing books that you should immediately buy. View all posts by
Michael Huemer , March 9 2019, "How Good Is the Universe??," Fake Nous, https://fakenous.net/?
p=261

Having said that, there seems to be a strong case that the value of the universe is in fact negative infinity, not positive. This
case is easy to overlook if you happen to be one of the tiny minority of beings who lead comfortable, prosperous lives (which probably includes
approximately 100% of readers of this blog). Throughout human history, however, most people lived in conditions that we would regard as the
most severe poverty, far worse than the situation of “poor people” in today’s America. In the past ,almost everyone lived under
oppressive dictatorships, or else in primitive tribes for whom fighting was so common that perhaps a
fifth of all people died at the hands of other people. Before the 20th century, most people’s work was backbreaking,
physical toil. There was no air conditioning or indoor plumbing. If you needed surgery, there was no anesthetic. Nature was cruel, and
other human beings were crueler. War was much more common than today, and its victims were commonly either
dismembered, raped (if female), or enslaved. People enjoyed torturing each other, as in the case of the ancient Romans
forcing slaves to fight to the death. If you were sent back to 1000 A.D. using a time machine, and you knew you could never return, it’s not
obvious that the rational response would not be to immediately kill yourself. Of course, human lives in the future might also be much better
than today. And perhaps there will be many more of these lucky future people than there were of the unfortunate past people. Then again,
maybe not – there is a pretty good chance that the human species will destroy itself in one way or another. But all that is just to speak of the
lives of human beings, which are a tiny fraction of all the conscious lives that have existed and will exist on this planet. There have been many
times more non-human conscious beings who have lived and died just in farms run by human beings than there have been of human beings
themselves; needless to say, the
lives of most farm animals are awful. What about wild animals, who are by far the
majority of sentient beings in the history of the Earth? While not as bad as factory-farm animals, the lives of wild animals
are probably worse than the lives of primitive humans. They are in constant danger from one cause or another – starvation, disease, parasites,
being eaten alive by predators. They must sleep outside when it snows. If they become sick or injured, there are no doctors; they’ll just have to
wait to die. I don’t think it’s obvious whether these are overall positive- or negative-utility lives. But it’s at least plausible that they are negative.
Life on other planets is probably broadly similar. The reasons for the suffering on Earth are broad facts
about life that are likely to obtain as well on any planet in the universe where life evolves. For instance, there is likely to be a chronic threat
of starvation for animals on any planet, because if there were ever a time of plenty, that fact would lead to an increase in the population until
the food supply was used up. That dynamic isn’t specific to Earth; that’s about the nature of life.
 Non wipeout stuff
The affirmative doesn’t justify any moral claim or justify ethics, they don’t meet the
burden of proof – vote neg on presumption.
 Induction
Induction fails, we have no good reason to believe that the rules of the past will
continue into the future.
Henderson 18, Leah, 3-21-2018, "The Problem of Induction (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)," No Publication,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/

We generally think that the observations we make are able to justify some expectations or predictions about
observations we have not yet made, as well as general claims that go beyond the observed. For example, the observation that bread of a
certain appearance has thus far been nourishing seems to justify the expectation that the next similar piece of bread I eat will also be
nourishing, as well as the claim that bread of this sort is generally nourishing. Such
inferences from the observed to the
unobserved, or to general laws, are known as “inductive inferences”. The original source of what has become
known as the “problem of induction” is in Book 1, part iii, section 6 of A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume, published in 1739. In 1748,
Hume gave a shorter version of the argument in Section iv of An enquiry concerning human understanding. Throughout this article we will give
references to the Treatise as “T”, and the Enquiry as “E”. Hume
asks on what grounds we come to our beliefs about
the unobserved on the basis of inductive inferences. He presents an argument in the form of a dilemma which appears to
rule out the possibility of any reasoning from the premises to the conclusion of an inductive inference. There are, he says, two possible types of
arguments, “demonstrative” and “probable”, but neither will serve. A demonstrative argument produces the wrong kind of conclusion, and a
probable argument would be circular. Therefore, for Hume, the problem remains of how to explain why we form any conclusions that go
beyond the past instances of which we have had experience (T. 1.3.6.10). Hume stresses that he is not disputing that we do draw such
inferences. The challenge, as he sees it, is to understand the “foundation” of the inference—the “logic” or “process of argument” that it is
based upon (E. 4.2.21). The problem of meeting this challenge, while evading Hume’s argument against the possibility of doing so, has become
known as “the problem of induction”. Hume’s argument is one of the most famous in philosophy. A number of philosophers have attempted
solutions to the problem, but a significant number have embraced his conclusion that it is insoluble. There is also a wide spectrum of opinion on
the significance of the problem. Some have argued that Hume’s argument does not establish any far-reaching skeptical conclusion, either
because it was never intended to, or because the argument is in some way misformulated. Yet many have regarded it as one of the most
profound philosophical challenges imaginable since it seems to call into question the justification of one of the most fundamental ways in which
we form knowledge. Bertrand Russell, for example, expressed the view that
if Hume’s problem cannot be solved,
“there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity” (Russell 1946: 699).
 Truth fails
Any statement of truth must be contingent on unproved postulates. 

Patterson 15. Steve Patterson, 9-27-2015, "The Logic of the Infinite Regress – Steve Patterson," http://steve-patterson.com/the-logic-of-the-infinite-regress/
 
Every proposition is contingent – contingent on other contingencies.  If we were to ask, “Ultimately,
what is conclusion Z justified by?”, the only logically consistent answer is to say, “Nothing”. If you ever
end up with a non-contingently true premise, you’re not dealing with an infinite regress.

Thus, by logical necessity, any argument which falls into an infinite regress is foundationless. There’s no
reason to believe any proposition in an infinite chain – because there’s no real justification to be found,
by definition.

Big Implications

Many skeptical philosophers have profoundly concluded: therefore, all knowledge is without
foundation. No non-contingently true premise exists, therefore we cannot know anything at all.
 Pareto
The aff isn’t pareto optimal, vote neg
Pressbooks No Date, "8.3 Utility and Pareto Optimality: The Orthodox Economic View of Social
Welfare – Principles of Microeconomics: Scarcity and Social Provisioning," No Publication,
https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/socialprovisioning/chapter/8-3-utility-and-pareto-optimality-the-
orthodox-economic-view-of-social-welfare/

For orthodox economists the ideal outcome for an economy is an outcome in which Pareto optimality is
achieved.  The concept of Pareto optimality owes its origins to a 19th century Italian mathematician
Vilfredo Pareto.  Stated simply, the Pareto criterion for determining whether an economy has produced
the “best” or “ideal” outcome is fulfilled when economic outcomes are such that there is no way to
make any one or many people better off without making any one person or many worse off.

On its own the Pareto criterion for social well-being is an attractive proposition.  After all if someone is
harmed in order to improve the plight of someone else or many others, then it appears obvious that
someone is being granted preferential treatment at the expense of someone else or many others.  The
granting of preferential treatment hardly seems fair or equitable.  In this context, the utilization of the
Pareto criterion eliminates the need to make those choices.

Additionally, the granting of preferential treatment opens the door to a long series of ethical questions
that can be avoided by applying the Pareto criterion.  On what basis is the decision to harm or benefit
being made?  How or when are interventions that inflict harm or bestow benefits decided? If an
intervention does take place, who is making the decision to inflict harm or bestow benefits?  What is the
degree of harm or benefit triggered by an intervention?  What is the ethical basis for intervening?  In
many ways, whenever a government must make budgetary decisions, it is asking and answering these
questions.  For example, perhaps government policymakers would like to expand the size of the
military.  Expanding the size of the military requires that the government finance the expansion of the
military.  Financing military expansion may require that other government spending programs be
reduced.  Alternatively, perhaps taxes will be raised to pay for the military expansion.  Either way,
whomever is responsible for financing the military expansion is directly paying for someone else to
benefit.  In defense of expanding the military, policymakers may have to justify to the public why the
public will, presumably, benefit from the expansion of the military.  The Pareto criterion appears to
clearly answer these questions.  If a society knows when it is in a position of maximum benefit, then, on
the basis of the Pareto criterion, no justification can be made to either harm or benefit anyone, causing
all of the above questions become moot.