Intellectual integrity denotes a commitment to the honestpursuit of truth through openness to evidence, ideas, and the criticisms ofothers. It prohibits the subordination of truth to expediency or personal gain,and requires us to be on guard against self-deception and short-sightedness. Itrequires a balance between the courage of honest conviction and the humility torecognize that our conclusions must always be uncertain and provisional.
Practiced with intellectual integrity, debate can be apowerful vehicle for personal growth. It encourages the self-reflection thathelps students to cultivate a mature inner-life. Conscience is little more thanan honest internal dialogue – the ability to critically reflect on one’s ownthoughts and actions. Openness to opposing beliefs requires appreciating whatthe world looks like from someone else’s point of view, which in turn fostershumility, perspective, and tolerance. I think that many of us credit debate asa formative experience precisely because it taught us the virtue ofintellectual integrity.
Intellectual integrity is also indispensable in cultivatinga sense of civic virtue. Our public life is plagued by sophistry and mindlessline-toeing. Politics is treated like a spectator sport, and we engage only if weare enthralled by the spectacle. Intellectual integrity is a bulwark againstcitizenship devolving in this way. One with intellectual integrity is willingto be persuaded by reasoned argument rather than held hostage by ideology ortribalism. It requires suspicion of convention and to be more than a merepolitical dilettante or pseudo-intellectual. Above all, intellectual integrity barscredulous acquiescence to demagogues and mediocre apologists. By carefulexamination of the challenges we must face together, debate can foster a maturesense of connection to our many communities. We must recognize the burden ofstewardship that comes with the opportunity to work with gifted young people.
If what I’ve said rings true, then the debate community isobliged to embrace intellectual integrity as one of its core values. We aspireto be a community of thinkers and learners, and this goal is conveyed notsimply by what we teach in the classroom but by the practices we deploy. Iencourage the examination of those practices through the lens of intellectualintegrity.
Against PurposefulObfuscation
Too often in debate, strategy devolves into sophistry.Debaters utilize a series of tactics designed only to muddy the water, toobscure a fair evaluation of the merits of their arguments by either judges oropponents. This includes the distortion of evidence, e.g. by reading cards outof context so as to make it seem that authors using terms differently actuallyintend the same meaning. It includes evasive or overly ambiguous explanations ofarguments, designed to allow debaters to shift their positions in therebuttals. It includes impossibly dense and blippy analytical frameworks withcontingent standards, layers of unreasonable spikes, theory bait, and othertricks hidden throughout.
These tactics are inconsistent with an ethic of intellectualintegrity. The rules that we set up to make the debate game intellectuallyrigorous are exploited to separate us altogether from a meaningful contest ofideas; the tail wags the dog. A student deploying these tactics hopes to winnot because he marshals the most compelling argument, but because his opponentmakes a superficial error or his judge is too embarrassed to admit that hedidn’t properly follow the argument. We hope that the practice of dialecticcontestation will help us to challenge or confirm our beliefs on importantpersonal and political questions. Strategies of purposeful obfuscation, on theother hand, turn arguments into mere instruments of power - ways ofmanipulating the circumstances to contrive a favorable outcome. Thesestrategies are disingenuous approaches to thinking through the topic becausethey are fundamentally unrelated to the residual quality of the arguments. Thatbad arguments could reliably beat good ones should strike us as a very strangeoutcome in any debate event worthy of the name.
Against ShallowArgumentation
There are too many cases whose purposeful design is notpassable as genuine intellectual work product. Arguments crafted by non-experthigh school students can only hope to approximate scholarly work, but that doesnot excuse an entirely unrigorous treatment of the topic.
Most familiarly, these include cases whose only strategiclogic is the speed at which they are read. I am a believer in the merits offast debate, but when that tactic is used not to develop arguments more deeplybut to increase the sheer number of disconnected, weakly warranted blips on theflow, it ceases to do anything that remotely resembles the realisticjustification of arguments.
Similarly familiar are debaters who refuse to defend atopic-relevant advocacy. It seems most reasonable to me to interpret debate resolutionsas normative. We evaluate the topic in the hopes that our conclusions mightaffect our choices in the real world. Many cases take such a rigid, formalisticapproach that any connection they have to our lived experiences goes out thewindow. These tactics are virtually identical to what is commonly called “thepivot” in Presidential debates. When a candidate finds a question unpalatable,he simply creates a superficial connection to another topic about which he ismore confident. The tactic is designed to avoid engagement on difficult orcontroversial issues and instead fall back onto clichés and stock-phrases – theopposite of intellectual integrity.
So-called “democracy” cases are a good example. Thesepositions include a framework about the importance of democracy and thenarguments purporting to prove that one side of the resolution is ‘what thepeople want.’ On the surface, these cases generally misrepresent theirframework authors and deploy extremely low-quality offense like cable newsnetwork polls. More fundamentally, they turn what are essentially normativetopics into uninteresting descriptive questions about which there really is nomeaningful objective answer. It is a perversion to suggest that a belief indemocracy could be an excuse to notdebate the merits of an issue and instead defer blindly to some arbitrarysnapshot of public opinion. Even more disconcerting (but for essentially thesame reasons) are so-called “sovereignty” positions, which posit that becausethe state must be sovereign we should simply do whatever it wants. Nobody actually believes that, and itabdicates the basic role of argument in a democratic society. Yet, we’ve builtan argument culture that consistently gives these positions a great deal ofcredit.
Similarly, many debaters routinely deploy extremely denseand esoteric philosophical positions to avoid substantive, topical debate.There are many times in debate rounds when I can see the virtue of a very welldeveloped debate about highly specialized philosophical questions. Philosophydebate is a critical part of thinking rigorously about the relative importanceof impacts. That said, it’s hard to imagine that whether the U.S. shouldimplement a universal healthcare system (for example) routinely turns on whethermotivational internalism is a legitimate constraint on validating moraltheories. In response to a poverty relief case that purported to save 18million lives per year, I once heard a debater ask incredulously, “Whatframework does that link to?” You have to be taught that there is a credibleargument that makes 18 million lives per year an irrelevant impact – I doubtvery many people come into the activity with that sensibility. By necessityevery argument makes unwarranted assumptions, but we have somehow imposed anenormously high burden of proof on our most plausible intuitions. Philosophydebate is great, but what currently passes as philosophy debate is often adeeply misguided approach to the topic.
Finally, many debaters abuse theory in precisely the sameway. On many questions LD is in the midst of a theory quagmire, so I guessseeing more theory debate is to be expected. I do believe that theory has animportant role to play in developing our community norms. Nevertheless, we allknow that debaters too often deploy gratuitous theory which can’t plausiblyadvance the interests of fairness or education one iota. This is another pivot:avoid the topic by changing the subject. It’s time for all of us to take someresponsibility on this issue.
What We Can Do AboutIt
Students
I encourage debaters to embrace the responsibility thatcomes with argumentative agency. Ultimately the person who chooses thearguments you run is you. More than that, you are the authors of the culture. Coachesand judges do what they can to provide incentives to debate in certain ways,but it is ultimately a commitment in the minds of debaters to deployintellectually sound strategies that creates the norm.
The willingness to win at any cost is a bankrupt approach todebate. While it’s great to take pride in your accomplishments, the luster ofdebate trophies will eventually fade. Choose to make one of your lastingcontributions to the community the choice to debate with intellectualintegrity. You will value the habits of mind you develop for the rest of yourlife.
Judges
Judges can change the incentive structure. Give lowerspeaker points for positions that purposefully obfuscate or take a shallowapproach to the topic. Refuse to vote on arguments you didn’t understand. Thattakes the courage to answer debaters’ questions honestly and stick to yourguns. To be thought of as a “good judge” is a status marker, and penalizingdebaters for common but unsound practices might jeopardize that, but recognizethat your need for validation from high school students should be trumped byyour obligations as an educator.
Lastly, make a good faith effort to meaningfully evaluatethe quality of arguments and give students feedback. Translating lines andarrows on the flow into oral form is the laziest and least useful thing you cando for students. We learn by talking about arguments, so talk about arguments.Judging isn’t always easy or formulaic, but it’s not supposed to be.
Coaches
As coaches, we must own up to the style with which our teamsdebate. Far too many of us decry practices that our own debaters utilize (I’msure I’ve been guilty of this). We can’t (and shouldn’t) exercise dictatorialcontrol over what arguments our students run, but we do have a bully pulpit.The burden of stewardship falls most directly on us, and it is irresponsible toabdicate this role entirely to camps, judges, and the tactical flavor of theweek.
More importantly, our students take their cues from us. If wesacrifice intellectual integrity for the sake of competitive success, ourexample will be heeded. Competition is a brilliant motivator for students topush themselves to do a great deal of high-quality work, but we can’t forgetthat winning is only an instrumental value. If our students walk away fromtheir debate careers without an appreciation for intellectual integrity, thensurely they’ve missed the point. Let’s do what we can to make sure that doesn’thappen.