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Introduction to Policy Debate

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Every debater wants to become better at answering critiques.  Although there is no simple formula to complete this task, there are a number of basic things that you can do to improve the quality of your debating against critiques.

Determine what type of critique you are debating.  You cannot answer a language critique the same you answer a disadvantage-style critique.  Uniqueness arguments, for example, are completely irrelevant against language critiques but arguably more relevant against disadvantage-style critiques.  You need to figure out what type of critique you are confronted with and adjusted your answers as suggested below.

Win a framework debate.  You can really answer all of the second and third generation critiques, and make inroads into the first generation critiques, by winning that the framework that the judge should use when deciding the debate is determining whether or not the plan is net-beneficial. If you can win this general argument on the negative, you can win that the affirmative loses because they don’t have a plan (they may just be singing or rapping and arguing that their performance should be evaluated by the judge), they should lose. Or, more limitedly, but very importantly, you can argue that the judge should decide the debate only on whether or not the plan is net-beneficial and that is the debate that you are winning. 

Winning the framework debate will not entirely defeat the first generation of critiques because those critiques have relevance in this traditional policy-making framework – they question the solvency and the desirability of the affirmative.

The framework arguments are still useful, however, because they include arguments that the judge should assess the desirability of the plan – challenging their “no fiat claim” and allowing the relevance of your disadvantages to come back into play.  Second, these framework arguments contend that the affirmative should only be responsible for the increment of harm their plan causes (they make the bad law a little more legitimate) and not all of the consequences of the action.  Although these framework arguments do not eliminate the relevance of the negative’s critique, they do substantially undermine its relevance.

In the remainder of this chapter I am going to discuss how to make additional answers to critiques that assume that you are able to push your opponent back into a framework that assesses the overall merits of the plan’s desirability.  A subsequent chapter with more advanced suggestions for debating critiques will cover answering these other forms of critique outside the plan desirability framework.  Disadvantage critiques are also the most popular form of critique in high school debate, so I want to give them the most attention.

Question the relationship between the link and the impact.  Most disadvantage-style critiques only posses a very tangential relationship between the link and the impact.  For example, a team may argue that the plan either promotes capitalism or is an example of capitalism in action.  They could argue that service trains individuals to be workers and that will support the capitalist system, which through resource development, will destroy the earth and cause human extinction.

The problem with this relatively simple argument is that affirmative does not support all of the manifestations of capitalism. You could, for example, support people giving service to the elderly and not ore mining in Africa that will trigger civil wars and environmental destruction.  Since critiques are really about what the affirmative supports, and the terminal impact to the critique usually comes from something the affirmative never said they support, you can argue that there is really no link between your plan and capitalism.

If the negative responds to this argument by suggestion that your plan will lead to the support of capitalism by training people to be service workers, you can argue that this is really just a disadvantage in disguise (it’s an A->B->C) argument.  Standard disadvantage burdens should then apply and the disadvantage is incredibly non-unique (we live in a very capitalist world).

Make a non-uniqueness claim.  There is really no reason that disadvantages have to be unique and that disadvantage-style critiques do not have to be.  You should argue that capitalism (or whatever) is entrenched now, that you only make it a little worse at best, and that your advantages outweigh the increment of the impact.

Make a logical permutations against the alternative.  Teams that present critiques of things like capitalism or the law will usually argue for alternatives that say things like “reject capitalism” or “reject the law.”  Since they’ll argue that the affirmative is a manifestation of capitalism, any permutation must include severing out of this original support of capitalism. This makes the permutation an illegitimate severance permutation.

The affirmative team can avoid this standard retort to the permutation by making a logical permutation.  A logical permutation breaks the alternative down to its various parts.  For example, capitalism includes at least all of these parts:  training people for service, service industry jobs, big companies that produce nuclear weapons for profits, and other companies that extract resources from the earth for profit, potentially destroying the environment.

A logical permutation would advocate doing/support the plan (training people for service) while rejecting service industry jobs, big companies that produce nuclear weapons for profit, other companies that extract resources from the earth for profit, and all other manifestations of capitalism.  This permutation is deadly for a few reasons.  First, it does not sever out of anything the affirmative originally advocated – training people for national service.  Second, it solves the entire impact to the critique because the critique’s impact stems from these other elements/manifestations of capitalism. 

This permutation will defeat almost every critique that has a relatively utopian alternative because it enables the affirmative to solve the impact.  It forces the debate back to whether or not the particular form of service the affirmative advocates is undesirable, and, after all, if the negative can win that that specific form of service is undesirable, they should be able to win the debate.  This is simply proving that the plan is disadvantageous.

Argue the alternative doesn’t solve and/or is bad.  Just as you can attack the solvency of a counterplan, you can attack the solvency of the alternative and argue  that simply rejecting capitalism will fail. You can also run disadvantages to the alternative, arguing that

Read impact turns.  If the negative says the state is bad, say it is good. If they say capitalism is bad, say it is good.  Many negative teams are not well-prepared to debate basic impact turns to their critiques.

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