Introduction to Framework

What is a Value and Value Criterion?

A value and value criterion are the standard components of a framework in Lincoln-Douglas debate. A value is the ultimate moral principle that your entire case is attempting to uphold, typically a broad philosophical concept like life, equality, or morality. The criterion, on the other hand, is the mechanism by which your case achieves the value, telling the judge how to weigh and evaluate whether or not that value is being upheld. Common criterions are standards like minimizing structural violence, maximizing expected wellbeing, or upholding the social contract. Having a well thought-out value and value criterion that connect well with your case are key to succeeding in traditional LD rounds.

Just as individuals have core values that guide their moral judgement, so too do debate cases. Typically very broad, your value is the ultimate moral goal of your case, and it is something that should be very easy for your judge to see as an inherent moral goal. The value is some universally moral goal your case may not directly achieve in full, but which will be connected to your case via your criterion. 

The value criterion is something that your case is more directly achieving–the standard by which your case upholds your value. In the next section of this guide, you will see some of the most common morality-oriented criterions, but it’s important to note that the best criterions are something that is achievable for both teams, but that your case specifically achieves. While it may seem strategic to have a criterion that is something like minimizing an impact, it is much more strategic to have a more generalizable criterion. For example, if we look at the September/October plea bargaining topic and assume that you were using a value of justice, it is better to have a value criterion of minimizing structural violence, and show how the impact of court clog increases structural violence, than it is to just have a criterion of minimizing court clog. This is because it is easier to convince your judge that the goal of minimizing structural violence directly upholds justice than it is to say that minimizing court clog upholds justice, as that is too specific for the situation and isn’t as easy to defend as a general moral standard. 

The value and value criterion should be clearly connected in your framework page. This should be done through first, explaining what your value entails, then showing what your criterion is trying to achieve, then showing how your value and criterion are connected, or some other ordering of that. For example, some common value criterion pairs include: a value of justice and criterion of minimizing structural violence, a value of morality and a criterion that is based in a certain philosopher’s ideas, a value of life and a criterion of ecocentrism, or other such pairs. It should be relatively intuitive how your value and criterion connect, but you should also clearly explain how achieving your criterion best upholds your value. 

A criterion, as I said before, is the way through which the judge should view your case. The criterion is very important in weighing your case. Your criterion should be specific to your case and it should be clear how your case connects to your criterion. Some examples of strategic uses of criterion include having impacts of racial inequity, and a criterion of minimizing structural violence, impact of extinction and a criterion of minimizing existential risk, or an impact of death and a criterion of consistency with utilitarianism. These are only a few examples of ways in which impact, criterion, and value can be connected, and I encourage you to explore more, but having a convincing narrative connecting the three is key to succeeding in traditional Lincoln Douglas debate.

Different Types of Moral-Oriented Criterions

As seen previously in another guide and throughout this one, LD debate topics typically orient themselves around morality and philosophy, with words like ought, immoral, just, etc. Ought is typically defined as a moral obligation, which also begs the question of what morality is. Defining morality is technically framing the debate, and can give you a huge advantage if you win your framework.

There are 5 most common morality-oriented frameworks, all divided by different philosophers and ideas. We’ll line them below:

1. Utilitarianism and Maximizing Well-Being (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill)

2. Minimizing Structural Violence (Winter and Leighton)

3. Consistency with the Categorical Imperative/Deontology (Immanuel Kant)

4. Lockean Proviso/The Social Contract (Locke, Hobbes, Gauthier)

5. The Original Positions/ Rawls’ Theory of Justice (John Rawls)

Each one serves different framing purposes based on what your contentions or arguments are. Here’s a brief summary of each, with more details on each provided in the Intermediate and Advanced Guides.

1. Utilitarianism & Maximizing Well-Being - THE most common

   1. Utilitarianism is defined as doing the most good for the largest number of people, with ‘good’ being measured through pleasure and pain. For example, we should prevent nuclear war/extinction impacts because it causes the most pain for the most people. Death is the worst impact under this framework. Util (short-hand version for utilitarianism) is a consequentialist framework, which means that consequences are held the highest when determining if an action is moral (eg. murder is immoral because the consequence is death)

      1. Maximizing Well-Being is essentially the same thing. Usually, you incorporate this into framing as the value being life, morality, etc., and the value criterion being utilitarianism, or maximizing well-being. Then, you would give reasons to prefer the criterion.

      2. Reasons to prefer usually include that utilitarianism is the only weighing mechanism that is truly equal, designating equal utility to each person, states must aggregate, etc. 

2. Minimizing Structural Violence - Minority-focused Framing

   1. Structural violence is  harm caused by unjust social structures and institutions that prevent people from meeting basic needs, usually involving systemic issues like racism, sexism, poverty, etc. Putting your value criterion as minimizing structural violence and winning it means that the Judge must now vote for the debater that best helps minorities being harmed by institutions, or best improves social structures. This framing is mainly utilized for contentions that focus on impacts to the minorities. (For example, on the NSDA Jan Feb Nuclear Weapon Possession topic, minimizing structural violence is a good criterion to frame impacts such as indigenous displacement due to nuclear testing and uranium mines, since indigenous people do often get discriminated against and harmed by social structures)

3. Consistency with the Categorical Imperative/Deontology

   1. There is a heavy contrast between Deontology and Utilitarianism. Anyone running this framework wants to frame human rights as first, or is looking for more philosophical debate than contention/substance debate.  This framework is one of the hardest to understand, but it is very rewarding and can serve an advantage against those who do not understand it.

   2. Deontology is coined by Immanuel Kant, a philosopher who wrote guidelines for what morality should be in what he calls the Categorical Imperative. This guideline outlines duties and the criteria for an action to be moral. It has a couple maxims, we’ll outline some of the most important below.

      1. Reason and Universalizability - Deontology emphasizes knowledge coming from reason, instead of empiricism, since we can never verify if we’re actually feeling something. Feelings and the senses can dupe us, but reason is intrinsic to us such that it's not susceptible to an evil demon being able to deceive us. Universalizability is a concept that people derive from reason, saying that for an action to be moral, it must be universalizable - I should be able to envision a world where that action is done all around me. For example, lying is an immoral action, because it is not universalizable - I cannot imagine a world where everyone lies around me, there would be no point to communication. Universalizability is key for moral consistency.

      2. Intentions - Take the consequentialist utilitarian framework - what makes murder immoral is the consequence of death. But Kant says no! Because under that consequential logic, I should kill Adolf Hitler’s great great great great great great great grandmother because the consequence is the Holocaust. But that’s not fair to the grandmother! She couldn’t have possibly known. Kant says that consequences aren’t predictable, and an agent shouldn’t be held morally culpable for them. Instead, we should be held accountable for our intentions. What makes murder immoral is the intention to do harm upon someone.

      3. Individuality - Take the classic trolley problem. If I was in a position to switch the lever of a train that’s either about to kill one person or three people, the utilitarian approach would be to kill one person to save the three people, because that’s doing the most good for the most amount of people. But Kant says no! (I don’t know what he’d do in this place, probably he’d say something like don’t be in that position in the first place) That is treating that one person as a means to achieve three people’s well-being. We should never treat people as a means, we should treat each individual as ends in themselves. 

4. Lockean Proviso/The Social Contract

   1. This framework is also very rights-focused, and emphasizes entering in contracts. This criterion would emphasize impacts/contentions that harm property rights, liberty, etc, and would provide a guideline for how governments ought to act. For example, on the rewilding topic on NEG, a popular contention was property rights under the framing of the Lockean Proviso.

   2. There’s a separate framing other than the Lockean Social Contract, which is Hobbes. Hobbes says that governments are good because it prevents humans from going into their state of nature - basically evil, chaos, etc. So whatever prevents that from happening is good! (I’m sorry, I’ve never ran this before)

   3. New modern social contract theory says that entering into a contract is moral because it encourages me to care about your pleasure and pain. Contracts are the only motivational theory, because under utilitarianism, why would I ever care about you, the reader's pleasure? 

5. Rawls’ Original Position

   1. John Rawls is an American Philosopher that seeks to create and envision a perfect just society under a liberal setting. This is something called ideal theory, and technically, all moral-oriented criterions are ideal theory, but we’ll get into that in later guides. 

   2. John Rawls introduced a concept called the Veil of Ignorance, where we hypothetically put people under it and remove them from their background knowledge, who they are, what their identity is, etc. They are now in the Original Position. Now, those individuals, if need be, would help the least well-off, the poverty-stricken, the minorities, etc. just in case they are one. Under that ideal society, we minimize disadvantages and promote equality of opportunity - impacts and contentions that complete this will work best under this framing.

   3. While Rawls is most known for his ‘Original Position’, it’s not the only theory he posits - he takes stances on almost every philosophical theory, and more details can be found in his book ‘Theory of Justice’

***You can explore some of these framework philosophies more in-depth in our Introduction to Philosophy in Traditional Debate guide!