Just pinging other participants in the Ultrarated tournament. Please vote if you can, thank you for your time :)
Thanks again for a fun debate. Best of luck in your last round.
Best of luck, looking forward to a great debate.
I understand those points, especially with not connecting to the resolution as thoroughly as I should have. Thanks for the feedback, it's very helpful.
This was a good debate, it's clear there was lots of effort and research from both sides. I'll try to vote on it by this weekend.
Leaning, thanks for the voting and feedback.
Now that this debate is finished, I'll give a few of my thoughts.
Regarding the topic itself, I'm relatively neutral; while I can see the merits of legal personhood, it's a fairly radical change. I'm more in support of laws which offer rights to non-humans in a way which comes without all the baggage of legal personhood.
The format itself is somewhat Con-skewed due to the fact that Con is not explicitly required to defend the status quo. Combined with Con going 2nd, that allows Con to offer counterplans which solve for all of the advantages of legal personhood while avoiding the difficulties. Pro essentially is playing catch-up, which creates a significant skew in efficiency. For example, if Con had simply creates a counterplan which offered all the same rights to non-humans without the formalities of legal personhood, it'd be fairly annoying to deal with because I'd lose a lot of my R1 offense, which focused on uniqueness compared to the status quo.
My strategy going into the debate was to try and split it into three separate policies in order to make it harder for Con to create blanket counterplans like that. I figured that if I was losing on any of them, I could kick it and just default to my strongest plan. That sort of ended up happening in the final round; I intended for people to vote on my AI point, since animals/environment were a lot more unclear.
I think Con's best chance was probably focusing more on creating a clear, specific policy of his own rather than just saying that legal personhood is incoherent. Unclear as it might be, it's still an improvement over no policy at all. In particular, for AI, it was necessary to create a counterplan which was actually exclusive with my own policy. The clash on animals/environments was fine, I felt I might've been narrowly winning on the former at the end (mostly due to utilitarianism framing making it so that prioritizing animal interests above human practicality is good), but I ultimately decided not to devote the character space to go all-in on that point.
It was a fun debate, looking forward to the next one. If someone wants to debate me on this topic in the future, just let me know, I have a lot of leftover research that could be put to use.
Thanks for the vote and detailed feedback.
Thanks all for taking the time to vote, really appreciate it.
Likewise, it's been years since I've done a written debate and it was fun. I have some thoughts on the topic itself (which was really interesting) which I'll post after the voting period ends, but I'd love to discuss the debate over PM until then.
Great debate, best of luck in your last round. For what it's worth, my first draft of this round was around 15000 characters.
I ran out of characters to say this, but thanks for the warm welcome to the site! Looking forward to this tournament too.
Good luck! Should be a fun debate.
