Burdens

A brief introduction to the structure of debate and burdens.

what is debate?

Debate is an adversarial game playing by two teams—the affirmative and negative—surrounding what is known as a resolution:

The United States federal government should enact the Lower Drug Cost Now Act of 2019.

Why is it structured this way? Among a number of interpretations, debate can be seen as a tool for decision-making under conditions of scarcity. An action is proposed for an agent to take, and we as debaters must be adversaries to determine whether this action should be taken. This interpretation comes from “parliamentary” or “policy” debate—mimicking our governmental debates over potential action.

Given this, the structure of debate revolves around two primary burdens:

1. the burden of proof (affirmative)
2. the burden of rejoinder (negative)

the burden of proof

To show that the action in the resolution should be taken by its actor, the affirmative team must prove the resolution true. In the above example, if the affirmative can prove that it is true that the US federal government should enact the act, then we have determined that it is a desirable action (and so we should take it). This is the affirmative’s burden of proof.

Now, this burden of proof is not as simple as it seems. Let’s take a step back and look at what type of statements a person can make (since of course, the resolution is an example of a statement someone makes).

Positive/descriptive statements are objective and factual. They answer questions like what is, was, or will be. For example, “the sky is blue” or “the US currently spends over a billion dollars in the military.” In contrast, normative/prescriptive statements are subjective and value-based. They answer questions like what should or ought to be. For example, “the US should decrease its military spending”.

In parliamentary debate, you usually debate resolutions that are normative statements. For example, policy-style resolutions like the example about the Lower Drug Cost Now Act are normative statements. Other resolutions, like “Public protests are effective”, may seem like positive statements, but “effective” is subjective and depends on what success or value might look like to someone.

Now, the affirmative must answer the question: “how can we prove the truth of the resolution?” (to satisfy their burden of proof). The choice of underlying value (or framework) dictates the answer to this question. For example, if the affirmative choose a form of consequentialism (a framework that determines the desirability of an action from the desirability of its consequences), they must posit a set of consequences that will occur as a result of resolution and explain why those consequences are “good”. So depending on the framework the affirmative chooses or assumes, the method of proving the resolution true changes.

A natural follow-up question is: aren’t there so many ways that the resolution’s action could take place? It seems difficult for the affirmative to have to prove that every version of the resolution is desirable to prove its truth. But the affirmative doesn’t need to defend all of them. If the affirmative chooses a mechanism or some way that the resolution could be implemented (called the plan) and proves that this advocacy are net beneficial, they’ve shown that an instance of the resolution should be done, and thus the resolution is true.

This burden of the affirmative confirms what we originally started out with: a role of the ballot (ROB). You’ll hear this term thrown around a lot in technical rounds, but in the large majority of policy rounds, the role of the ballot is to truth-test the resolution. Truth-testing is an important term that will come up again in the future—it simply refers to the process of determining the truth (or at least how true) a statement is.

tl;dr: the affirmative’s burden is to prove the resolution true. An underlying value is assumed (or debated), and the affirmative commonly chooses a specific implementation of the resolution to defend.

the burden of rejoinder

The next natural question is: what does the negative do? If the ROB is to truth-test the resolution, it seems as though the negative burden should be to prove the falsity of the resolution.

Now, if the negative had to do this in a vacuum, this can be exceedingly difficult! There seem to a multitude of ways to implement the action of a resolution—e.g.:

The United States federal government should increase its investment in energy.

Energy! What kind of energy? By how much should investment be? Does the negative have to negate every possible form of investment in order to prove the resolution false? This interpretation effectively forces the negative to prove true the statement:

There are no instances where the United States federal government should increase its investment in energy.

which is similar to the Black Swan problem. We can’t determine whether a statement like All swans are white is true without checking the color of all swans, and if we aren’t exhaustive, we cannot conclude truth with certainty. Any counterexample to such a totalizing statement will prove it false.

Fortunately, the negative does not have this burden. The original burden of proof of the resolution means “one who asserts/affirms must prove”—and if this proof is insufficient or shown to be false, then we presume that the resolution is false.

Every round starts with the affirmative speech—a plan is introduced and justified as a course of action that departs from the status quo. At this point, there is no reason to believe that the affirmative claims aren’t true. However, the moment the negative responds to or rejoins the affirmative, the affirmative case’s truth value comes into question. This is the negative’s burden of rejoinder: the negative must disprove or negate the affirmative to win the round. It’s important to remember that since the affirmative has chosen an instance of the resolution to defend, the negative doesn’t have to negate the entire resolution, but rather negate the specific instance of the resolution that the affirmative chooses.

tl;dr:

1. The negative must negate the affirmative to satisfy their burden of rejoinder.
2. With this burden, the negative proves that the affirmative plan is not preferable to (or worse than) the status quo.
3. If the negative does so, the judge “presumes” (or votes negative on presumption), which indicates that the benefits of the affirmative plan have not been sufficiently justified over the cons, costs, and resources, and thus the current state of affairs is preferred.