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1NC Universe

The universe is expanding, but we do not know what it is expanding into. This makes the universe

simultaneously all-encompassing and incomplete. The universe is therefore both all and none. This

makes life itself an unanswerable paradox, and you should default to the only logical explanation: the

universe does not even exist. Vote negative on presumption because the expansion of the universe is the

foremost metaphysical question and until that question is answered there is no value to the 1AC.

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absorbing the Greeks guilt (rather than sin) and warding off bad conscience (GM II:23). By taking Dionysus as ones godhead rather than Jehovah, by Nietzsches

lights, one would then evaluate life more positively, in all its immanence, transience, and suffering . He writes in BT: So my instinct at that time turned itself

against morality with this questionable book, as an instinct speaking on behalf of life, and invented for itself a fundamental counter-doctrine and counterevaluationof life, a purely artistic, an anti-Christian one. What should it be called? As a philologist and man of words I baptized it, not without taking a certain libertyfor

who knows the true name of the Antichrist?with the name of a Greek god: I called it the Dionysian (BT Attempt at Self-Criticism 5). To understand agency

according to this instinctual affirmation of life we would have to take into account the dual creative and destructive dynamics of life. To the extent that it is

aligned with a Dionysian affect, agency would thus involve an embrace of death, drunkenness, and dissolutionbut, importantly, according to deaths own

inevitability and within a context that sees the body becoming an active participant in the causes that determine it. It is clear, even putting aside his rather romanticframing of the problem here, that for Nietzsche what is at issue is a willingness to be aware of ones possibilitiesand moreover, ones limits. Since life demands

of each of us that we must die, we would be most empowered by taking an active part in this process at its most advantageous moment : We should recognize how

everything which comes into being [End Page 77] must be prepared for a painful demise, we are forced to peer into the terrors of individual existencewithout

turning to stone. . . . [T]he struggle, the agony, the annihilation of phenomena now seem necessary to us, in the context of the excess of countless forms of

existence which crowd and push their way into life, of the overwhelming fertility of the world-will (BT 17). In this respect, and somewhat counterintuitively,sometimes the most life-affirming path (and the moment of optimal agency) would be to end life.22 It might assist our understanding of this very specific account

of agency at this point to consider its connection to the philosophy of Nietzsches forerunner, Baruch Spinoza. Spinozas influence on Nietzsches thought is

already well established.23 The aspects of Spinozas work that particularly appealed to Nietzsche were his denial of free will, of teleology, and of the moral world

orderall of which circumscribe, for Spinoza, a kind of freedom embedded within his determinism and an understanding of agency and ethical capacity that

remains unpolluted by conventional morality.24 Yet at first glance this would seem a rather impoverished sense of freedom, especially if we take seriously theconviction each of these philosophers holds to, that all events are already determined. This determinism emerges from a thoroughgoing materialism, after the death

of God: a commitment that, as embodied subjectsor subjected bodies (GM II)we occupy a place in a physical ecosystem, as does any other animal. Continuous

with our environment, we humans are not invulnerable to external events that act on us ; nor are we self-caused. Rather, insofar as we are free, we participate in a

complex web of interactions through which our agency is bounded and context dependent.

Second is agency:

The way the 1AC conceptualizes death is flawed. Death is everything and everything is death. Your

mother, your father, your lover, your dog, all the plants and trees in the forest are all death. Each

withering away, every second of every day. The 1ACs attempt to securitize the world is flawed because it

always begins with the conclusion that death is bad and sees it as the ultimate universal truth. There is no

true knowing of death because if someone were to experience it then we could not speak to tell our

experience. Death is an unknowable phase and to speak like we do know of it leads to being terrorized by

the worlds inevitable hauntings.

Jeremy Fernando 2010 (The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death Pgs.: 16-18)

Death is this unknowability that resides in every act of knowing, every attempt to know: not adeath thatis merely a

phase of life, an end-point that is always already taken into consideration in advance, death as a negativity to life, but deathas such, death that is a pure void, that can at best be constituted as a catachrestic metaphor; death as a pure name, naming nothing except for the fact that it is naming.

This suggests thatwe cannot define death, that at best we might begin to approach it but that it will always already

slip away from us. It is not as if we cannot knowdeathbecause it is beyond us in fact itis part of us, a part of us that is always

already(n)eitherwithin us(n)or without us. In this sensewe are always stricken with death, but a death from

within that remains unknowable to us, one that we can at best glimpse as a metaphor, as a narrative, as fiction . It is with thisin mind that

weapproach Marguerite Duras' beautiful tale The Malady of Death. Perhaps in this non-direct way,we might begin to catch a glimpse of

the unknowability that haunts the self, that is always already of the self, that doesn't allow the self to totalize.One must

never forget that we can only see ghosts when we are not looking for them. In The Malady of Death, there is a conversationbetween a 'you' and a 'her': at first glance, it would seem that it is between a man and a woman in a room by the sea. Occasionally an 'I' perhaps a narrator; perhaps

the 'he' interjects. It is this impossibility of distinguishing, of separating the 'he' and the 'I' within the text, that brings the 'she' into question, that opens the question ofreferentiality; if one is never able to discern who is uttering the utterances, the poles of elocutionary and referentthe binary of subject and objectare imploded. At

the end, all you can say about the status of referentiality in the text, to borrow a phrase from the very first time the 'I' appears, is "I don't know";14 not just an 'I don't

know' in terms of a lack of knowledge, but more precisely an 'I don't know who the I that is uttering this statement 5 in the first place'. An echo of this is found later in

the line "you think you know you know not what ...":15 the first register it opens is 'whether one can know they don't know something'; another potentially more

interesting register is,if one only knows" one knowsone doesnot know, then whether something is known or not known is now unclear'. In either

instance,the difference between knowing and not knowing is blurred; they are no longer antonyms but

rather parts of each other: in other words,every time something is known, there is always already something

unknownwithin it. The unknowability is not only in the content the object to which the utterance refers tobut more radically in the relationality of the subject toitself: each time one utters "I don't know," one is attempting to name oneself as well, to utter one-self into being. The only difference that is posited between the I,

you, and her is found in the line, "your difference, your death." 1What is unknowablethe difference between the uttererswhat can only at best be

positedis death itself. This is why the tale is named The Malady of Death: death is always within one (one is a carrier of death

from the very beginning) and always also from without (death ultimately claims you). But it is not as if one ever knows how death

affects one: "one knows without knowing how"17 and more than that, "whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also

because he's like to die without any life to dieto, and without even knowing that's what he's doing."

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_nietzsche_studies/v035/35.faulkner.html#f22http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_nietzsche_studies/v035/35.faulkner.html#f23http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_nietzsche_studies/v035/35.faulkner.html#f24http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_nietzsche_studies/v035/35.faulkner.html#f22http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_nietzsche_studies/v035/35.faulkner.html#f23http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_nietzsche_studies/v035/35.faulkner.html#f24

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The nexus between our illusion of death and the soon to be immortality of the human race generates a

system of confusion between life and death that causes annihilation and destroys value to life

Jean Baudrillard 1992 (French Philosopher, The Illusion of the End, Pgs. 98-99)

There are several forms of death: a differentiated, dual, tragic form ~in the destiny of the higher mammals, which is linked to sexuality in a way,a sexed form of death. And there is the asexual, undifferentiated form a recessive stage which harks back to the molecular and protozoan stage of living beings, to

their unceremonious obliteration, leaving them no other form of destiny. In the concentration camps, even more than life, it was

death that was exterminated. The prisoners were dispossessed of their deaths deader than dead, disappeared.But

death can also be exterminated by the creation of indestructible life-processes .Which is what we are doing when weattempt to capture immortality in anatomical, biological and genetic processes. Locked into their undifferentiated forms, either by the definitive autonomization ofmultiple functions or by reduction to the smallest possible elements, the life processes become indestructible, and it is by the automatic working of these processes that

we are exterminating death by easy stages. It was with this form of immortal life, this nostalgia for a pure contiguity of life [le vivant] and its molecular sequentialiry,

that Freud associated the death instinct. Andit is to this kind of immortality that we are condemned today, as we are

condemned to an absence of destiny, to the negative immortality of what cannot end and thus reproduces itself indefinitely. In the past,man

thought himself immortal, but he was not. Or rather he secretly doubted that he was not . Otherwise, he would

not have needed to believe it. Today, we no longer believe we are immortal, yet it is precisely now that we are

becoming so, becoming quietly immortal without knowing it, without wishing it, without believing it, by

the mere fact of the confusion of the limits of life and death. No longer immortal in terms of the soul, which

has disappeared,nor even in terms of the body, which is disappearing,but in terms of the formula, immortal in terms of

the code. That is, we are beings for whom there will soon no longer be death, nor representation of death, nor even

and this is the worst illusion of death.

Suicide bombing is a mode of becoming, a singularity. Its not a programmable or mapable action it is

the act of self-annihilation, a full embracement of mysticism and chaos it cannot be understood only

interpreted, it the unknowability of the suicide bomber that obliterates the categorization of life, and

sublimates the individual to pure becoming.

Jeremy Fernando 2010(The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death Pgs.:137-139)

When someone is willing to give up their life, when someone is willing to give themselves as a gift of

death, what defense is there any longer? And more than that, how can one even begin to deal with a phenomenon

that not only escapes ones comprehension, but that is beyond understanding itself. It is of no coincidence

that the most feared figure of the Second World War was the Kamikaze pilot. For not only was the pilotwilling to diein some way all soldiers who enter a war zone, either willingly or not, enter a complicity to death, accept in some way the possibility of their

deathbut more profoundly, the Kamikaze pilot was indeed of a divine wind, of a divine nature, because he wasalready dead. Before each squadron was sent off, the Kamikaze pilots would gather for a last meal, a last

cigarette, a last cup of sake and a bow to the Emperor. Bythe time the pilot actually climbs into his cockpit,

he is already a dead man: his life and his deathhas already been offered during the ritual. The typical Western

analysis usually involves pointing out the fact that before flying, the pilots were pumped full of

amphetamines in order to allow them to fly their planes directly into targets. However this misses the

point as it assumes that it is only due to the drugged state that the pilots become suicide bombers, that it

was the drugs that made them into suicide bombs. Even if they , had gained a measure of Dutch courage

from the amphetamines, there is no denying that the pilots themselves were fully aware of their status asthe order of the Divine Wind the moment they began their training, the moment they become pilots. Hence, from that point onwards, their lives had already been

offered as a sacrifice: if the amphetamines had anything to do with it, it was merely an instrument which aided their task; the sacrifice had long ago been made. And it isthe ritual of which there are echoes of a Last Supper; or a last meal of a condemned inmate-which allows the Kamikaze pilot to sever himself from the real order, to

offer her/his selfas a stake. And like any true stake, the Kamikaze pilot has no idea what the reciprocation is,

what the effects of his sacrifice are: all that he knows is that he has offered himself: everything else he

remains blind to, remains in the dark from. The attempt to explain away, ascribe, his actions to the effect of

drugsanother favoriteis social pressures, or brainwashing by the Japanese military machineor any other cause isan attempt to re-inscribe the actions of the Kamikaze pilot back into a cause and effect analysis, to return it to the order of

reason. We are never quite as afraid when something opposes the order of reason: in fact by opposing it, the underlying assumptions are strengthened. And this is

what the offering of drugs as a reason attempts to do: by claiming that the pilots are flying in a drugged state , one is trying to establish that theiractions are the result of an illusion, a change in mental state: in that way reality is preserved, and one can

then ascribe this action- an action that is beyond explanation itself- to another reason: more importantly, reason itself is preserved.

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What frightens us the most is when there is no reason for action, when the action itself is beyond reason ,beyond explanation, beyond knowing: for in that way it always remains an enigma to us,and we have no ability, no hope, of being able to

discipline it, of putting it under us,of controlling it. But before we go on thinking the figure of the suicide bomber,we have to make amomentary diversion, and open another register of thinking, that of what is to be dead; and the question

of, what is this very moment of death, the instant of death itself ?

Third is human-centeredness:

The idea that humanity is something to be preserved is a product of anthropocentrism that prevents an

authentic relationship to existence. Extinction is inevitable and human life is not special. We are the same

cosmic dust that existed 4 million years ago, and we will be the same after death- we must embrace this

impending catastrophe to break down human centered value systems

Seed 88(John; Australian environmentalist and director of the Rainforest Information Centre; THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN - TOWARDS ACOUNCIL OF ALL BEINGS;http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Anthropo.htm)

"But the time is not a strong prison either. A little scraping of the walls of dishonest contractor's concrete Through a shower of chipsand sand makes freedom. Shake the dust from your hair. This mountain sea-coast is real For it reaches out far into the past and

future; It is part of the great and timeless excellence of things." (1)"Anthropocentrism" or "homocentrism" means

human chauvinism.Similar to sexism, but substitute "human race" for "man" and "all other species" for "woman".Humanchauvinism, the idea that humans are the crown of creation, the source of all value, the measureof all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness. "And the fear of you and the dread ofyou shall be upon every beast of the earth , and upon every fowl of the air, and upon all that moveth on the earth, and upon all the

fishes of the sea; into your hands they are delivered".(2)When humans investigate and see through their layersof anthropocentric self-cherishing, a most profound change in consciousness begins to takeplace . Alienation subsides. The human is no longer an outsider, apart. Your humanness is then recognisedas being merely the most recent stage of your existence, and as you stop identifying exclusively with this chapter, you start to get intouch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as a species only recently emerged from the rainforest. As the fog of amnesiadisperses, there is a transformation in your relationship to other species, and in your commitment to them. What is described hereshould not be seen as merely intellectual. The intellect is one entry point to the process outlined, and the easiest one to

communicate.For some people however, this change of perspective follows from actions on behalf ofMother Earth. "I am protecting the rainforest" develops to "I am part of the rainforest protecting

myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking." What a relief then! Thethousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature. Thatis, the change is a spiritual one, thinking like a mountain (3), sometimes referred to as "deepecology". As your memory improves, as the implications of evolution and ecology are

internalised and replace the outmoded anthropocentric structures in your mind, there is anidentification with all life , Then follows the realisation that the distinction between "life" and

"lifeless" is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000million years ago.Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves

into such stuff as this.We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on them with such acondescending air. It is they that are immortal part of us. (4)If we embark upon such an innervoyage, we may find, upon returning to present day consensus reality, that our actions on behalf

of the environment are purified and strengthened by the experience. We have found here a levelof our being that moth, rust, nuclear holocaust or destruction of the rainforest gene pool do notcorrupt. The commitment to save the world is not decreased by the new perspective, although

the fear and anxiety which were part of our motivation start to dissipate and are replaced by acertain disinterestedness.We act because life is the only game in town, but actions from a disinterested, less attached

consciousness may be more effective. Activists often don't have much time for meditation.The disinterested space wefind here may be similar to meditation. Some teachers of meditation are embracing deepecology (5) and vice versa(6).Of all the species that have existed, it is estimated that less than one in a hundred existtoday. The rest are extinct.As environment changes, any species that is unable to adapt, to change, toevolve, is extinguished . All evolution takes place in this fashion In this way an oxygen starvedfish, ancestor of yours and mine, commenced to colonise the land. Threat of extinction is the

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potter's hand that molds all the forms of life. The human species is one of millions threatened byimminent extinction through nuclear war and other environmental changes. And while it is truethat the "human nature" revealed by 12,000 years of written history does not offer much hopethat we can change our warlike, greedy, ignorant ways, the vastly longer fossil history assures

us that we CAN change. We ARE the fish , and the myriad other death-defying feats of flexibilitywhich a study of evolution reveals to us. A certain confidence ( in spite of our recent "humanity") is

warranted. From this point of view, the threat of extinction appears as the invitation to change, toevolve. After a brief respite from the potter's hand, here we are back on the wheel again. The

change that is required of us is not some new resistance to radiation, but a change inconsciousness. Deep ecology is the search for a viable consciousness. Surely consciousness emerged andevolved according to the same laws as everything else. Molded by environ mental pressures, the mind of our ancestors must timeand again have been forced to transcend itself. To survive our current environmental pressures, we must consciously remember our

evolutionary and ecological inheritance. We must learn to think like a mountain. If we are to be open toevolving a new consciousness, we must fully face up to our impending extinction ( the ultimate

environmental pressure). This means acknowledging that part of us which shies away from thetruth, hides in intoxication or busyness from the despair of the human, whose 4000 million year

race is run, whose organic life is a mere hair's breadth from finished.(7) A biocentric perspective,the realisation that rocks WILL dance, and that roots go deeper that 4000 million years, maygive us the courage to face despair and break through to a more viable consciousness, one thatis sustainable and in harmony with life again."Protecting something as wide as this planet is still an abstraction formany. Yet I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems - the oceans, the rainforests, the soil , thegrasslands, and all other living things - will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it".

(8) Jerry Brown, Governor of California.The term "deep ecology" was coined by the Norwegian professor of Philosophy and eco-activist Arne Naess, and has been taken up by academics and environmentalists in Europe, the US and Australia. "The essence ofdeep ecology is to ask deeper questions... We ask which society, which education, which form of religion is beneficial for all life onthe planet as a whole."

The impact is mass genocide. Speciesm is the foundation of all other hierarchies and the root cause to all

violence.Best 7 (Associate Professor, Departments of Humanities and Philosophy University of Texas, El Paso [Steven,Charles Patterson, The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust New York: LanternBooks, 2002, 280 pp])

While a welcome advance over the anthropocentric conceit that only humans shape human actions, the

environmental determinism approach typically fails to emphasize the crucial role that animals play in humanhistory, as well as how the human exploitation of animals is a key cause of hierarchy, social conflict, andenvironmental breakdown. A core thesis of what I call animal standpoint theory is that animals have been keydriving and shaping forces of human thought, psychology, moral and social life, and history overall. Morespecifically, animal standpoint theory argues that the oppression of human over human has deep roots in theoppression of human over animal. In this context, Charles Pattersons recent book, The Eternal Treblinka: OurTreatment of Animals and the Holocaust, articulates the animal standpoint in a powerful form withrevolutionary implications. The main argument of Eternal Treblinka is that the human domination of animals,such as it emerged some ten thousand years ago with the rise of agricultural society, was the firsthierarchical domination and laid the groundwork for patriarchy, slavery, warfare, genocide, and othersystems of violence and power . A key implication of Pattersons theory is that human liberation is implausible ifdisconnected from animal liberation, and thus humanism -- a speciesist philosophy that constructs a hierarchalrelationship privileging superior humans over inferior animals and reduces animals to resources for human use-- collapses under the weight of its logical contradictions. Patterson lays out his complex holistic argument inthree parts. In Part I, he demonstrates that animal exploitation and speciesism have direct and profoundconnections to slavery, colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism. In Part II, he shows how these connectionsexist not only in the realm of ideology as conceptual systems of justifying and underpinning domination andhierarchy but also in systems of technology, such that the tools and techniques humans devised for therationalized mass confinement and slaughter of animals were mobilized against human groups for the sameends. Finally, in the fascinating interviews and narratives of Part III, Patterson describes how personalexperience with German Nazism prompted Jewish to take antithetical paths: whereas most retreated to aninsular identity and dogmatic emphasis on the singularity of Nazi evil and its tragic experience, othersrecognized the profound similarities between how Nazis treated their human captives and how humanity as a

whole treats other animals, an epiphany that led them to adopt vegetarianism, to become advocates for the

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animals, and develop a far broader and more inclusive ethic informed by universal compassion for all sufferingand oppressed beings. The Origins of Hierarchy "As long as men massacre animals, they will kill eachother" Pythagoras It is little understood that the first form of oppression, domination, and hierarchy involveshuman domination over animals. Pattersons thesis stands in bold contrast to the Marxist theory that thedomination over nature is fundamental to the domination over other humans. It differs as well from the socialecology position of Murray Bookchin that domination over humans brings about alienation from the natural

world, provokes hierarchical mindsets and institutions, and is the root of the long-standing western goal todominate nature. In the case of Marxists, anarchists, and so many others, theorists typically dont evenmention human domination of animals, let alone assign it causal primacy or significance. In Pattersons model,

however, the human subjugation of animals is the first form of hierarchy and it paves the way for all othersystems of domination such as include patriarchy, racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. Ashe puts it, the exploitation of animals was the model and inspiration for the atrocities people committedagainst each other, slavery and the Holocaust being but two of the more dramatic examples. Hierarchyemerged with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In the shift from nomadic huntingand gathering bands to settled agricultural practices, humans began to establish their dominance over animalsthrough domestication. In animal domestication (often a euphemism disguising coercion and cruelty),humans began to exploit animals for purposes such as obtaining food, milk, clothing, plowing, andtransportation. As they gained increasing control over the lives and labor power of animals, humans bred themfor desired traits and controlled them in various ways, such as castrating males to make them more docile. Toconquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own property, humans developed numerous technologies, such aspens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons. The domination of animals paved the way for the

domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women, Patterson suggests, was modeled after thedomestication of animals, such that men began to control womens reproductive capacity, to enforce repressivesexual norms, and to rape them as they forced breeding in their animals. Not coincidentally, Patterson argues,slavery emerged in the same region of the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact,developed as an extension of animal domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed likelivestock, and males were castrated and forced to work along with females. In the fifteenth century, whenEuropeans began the colonization of Africa and Spain introduced the first international slave markets, themetaphors, models, and technologies used to exploit animal slaves were applied with equal cruelty and force tohuman slaves. Stealing Africans from their native environment and homeland, breaking up families whoscream in anguish, wrapping chains around slaves bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters acrosscontinents for weeks or months with no regard for their needs or suffering, branding their skin with a hot ironto mark them as property, auctioning them as servants, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them

for profit, beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in vast numbers all these horrors andcountless others inflicted on black slaves were developed and perfected centuries earlier through animalexploitation. As the domestication of animals developed in agricultural society, humans lost the intimateconnections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle, certainly, and with the bigoted assistance ofmedieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, western humanity had developed anexplicitly hierarchical worldview that came to be known as the Great Chain of Being used to positionhumans as the end to which all other beings were mere means. Patterson underscores the crucial point that thedomination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare, and genocide typically begins withthe denigration of victims. But the means and methods of dehumanization are derivative, for speciesismprovided the conceptual paradigm that encouraged, sustained, and justified western brutality toward otherpeoples. Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the master species, Patterson writes, our

victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation for our victimization of each other. The study

of human history reveals the pattern: first, humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other peoplelike animals and do the same to them. Whether the conquerors are European imperialists, Americancolonialists, or German Nazis, western aggressors engaged in wordplay before swordplay, vilifying their victims Africans, Native Americans, Filipinos, Japanese, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and other unfortunates withopprobrious terms such as rats, pigs, swine, monkeys, beasts, and filthy animals. Once perceived as

brute beasts or sub-humans occupying a lower evolutionary rung than white westerners, subjugated peopleswere treated accordingly; once characterized as animals, they could be hunted down like animals. Thefirst exiles from the moral community, animals provided a convenient discard bin for oppressors to dispose theoppressed. The connections are clear: For a civilization built on the exploitation and slaughter of animals, the`lower and more degraded the human victims are, the easier it is to kill them. Thus, colonialism, as Pattersondescribes,was a natural extension of human supremacy over the animal kingdom. For just as humans hadsubdued animals with their superior intelligence and technologies, so many Europeans believed that the white

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race had proven its superiority by bringing the lower races under its command. There are important parallelsbetween speciesism and sexism and racism in the elevation of white male rationality to the touchstone of moralworth. The arguments European colonialists used to legitimate exploiting Africans that they were less thanhuman and inferior to white Europeans in ability to reason are the very same justifications humans use totrap, hunt, confine, and kill animals. Once western norms of rationality were defined as the essence ofhumanity and social normality, by first using non-human animals as the measure of alterity, it was a short stepto begin viewing odd, different, exotic, and eccentric peoples and types as non- or sub-human. Thus, the samecriterion created to exclude animals from humans was also used to ostracize blacks, women, and numerousother groups from humanity. The oppression of blacks, women, and animals alike was grounded in an

argument that biological inferiority predestined them for servitude. In the major strain of western thought,alleged rational beings (i.e., elite, white, western males) pronounce that the Other (i.e., women, people of color,animals) is deficient in rationality in ways crucial to their nature and status, and therefore are deemed andtreated as inferior, subhuman, or nonhuman. Whereas the racist mindset creates a hierarchy ofsuperior/inferior on the basis of skin color, and the sexist mentality splits men and women into greater andlower classes of beings, the speciesist outlook demeans and objectifies animals by dichotomizing the biologicalcontinuum into the antipodes of humans and animals. As racism stems from a hateful white supremacism, andsexism is the product of a bigoted male supremacism, so speciesism stems from and informs a violent humansupremacism -- namely, the arrogant belief that humans have a natural or God-given right to use animals forany purpose they devise or, more generously, within the moral boundaries of welfarism and stewardship, whichhowever was Judaic moral baggage official Chistianithy left behind.

The CP solves- The endorsement of human suicide as a thought experiment breaks down human-

centered value systems

Kochi and Ordan 08(Tarik, lecturer in the School of Law, Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Noam, linguist and translatorconducts research in Translation Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel, 'An argument for the global suicide of humanity', Borderlands,December)//RSW

The version of progress enunciated in Hawking's story ofcosmic colonisation presents a view whereby the solutionto the negative consequences of technological action is to create new forms of technology, new forms of action. New action and innovation solve the dilemmas and consequences of previous action. Indeed, the very act of moving away, or rather evacuating, anecologically devastated Earth is an example at hand. Such an approach involves a moment of reflection--previous errors and consequences are examinedand taken into account and efforts are made to make things better. The idea of a better future informs reflection, technological innovation and action.

However, is the form of reflection offered by Hawking broad or critical enough? Does his mode of reflection pay enough attention tothe irredeemable moments of destruction, harm, pain and suffering inflicted historically by human action uponthe non-human world? There are , after all, a variety ofnegative consequences of human action , moments ofdestruction , moments ofsuffering , which may not be redeemable or ever made better. Conversely there are a number ofconceptions of the good in which humans do not take centre stage at the expense of others.What we try to do in this paper is to draw outsome of the consequences of reflecting more broadly upon the negative costs of human activity in the context ofenvironmental catastrophe. This involves re-thinking a general idea of progress through the historical andconceptual lenses of speciesism, colonialism, survival and complicity. Our proposed conclusion is that the only appropriate moralresponse to a history of human destructive action is to give up our claims to biological supremacy and tosacrifice our form of life so as to give an eternal gift to others . From the outset it is important to make clear that theargument for the global suicide of humanity is presented as a thought experiment . The purpose of such aproposal in response to Hawking is to help show how a certain conception of modernity , of which his approach is

representative, is problematic . Taking seriously the idea of global suicide is one way of throwing into questionan ideology or dominant discourse of modernist-humanist action. [3] By imagining an alternative to the existingstate of affairs, absurd as it may seem to some readers by its nihilistic and radical 'solution',we wish to open upa ground for a critical discussion of modernity and its negative impacts on both human and non-humananimals , as well as on the environment . [4] In this respect,by giving voice to the idea of a human-free world, weattempt to draw attention to some of the asymmetries of environmental reality and to give cause to question

why attempts to build bridges from the human to the non-human have, so far, been unavailing. Subjects of ethicaldiscourse One dominant presumption that underlies many modern scientific and political attitudes towards technology and creative human action is thatof 'speciesism', which can itself be called a 'human-centric' view or attitude. The term 'speciesism', coined by psychologist Richard D. Ryder and laterelaborated into a comprehensive ethics by Peter Singer (1975), refers to the attitude by which humans value their species above both non-human animalsand plant life. Quite typically humans conceive non-human animals and plant life as something which might simply be used for their benefit. Indeed, thisconception can be traced back to, among others, Augustine (1998, p.33). While many modern, 'enlightened' humans generally abhor racism, believe inthe equality of all humans, condemn slavery and find cannibalism and human sacrifice repugnant, many still think and act in ways that are profoundly'speciesist'. Most individuals may not even be conscious that they hold such an attitude, or many would simply assume that their attitude falls within the

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'natural order of things'. Such an attitude thus resides deeply within modern human ethical customs and rationales and plays a profound role in the wayin which humans interact with their environment. The possibility of the destruction of our habitable environment on earth through global warming andHawking's suggestion that we respond by colonising other planets forces us to ask a serious question about how we value human life in relation to ourenvironment. The use of the term 'colonisation' is significant here as it draws to mind the recent history of the colonisation of much of the globe by whiteEuropean peoples. Such actions were often justified by valuing European civilisation higher than civilisations of non-white peoples, especially that ofindigenous peoples. For scholars such as Edward Said (1978), however, the practice of colonialism is intimately bound up with racism. That is,colonisation is often justified, legitimated and driven by a view in which the right to possess territory and govern human life is grounded upon an

assumption of racial superiority. If we were to colonise other planets, what form of 'racism' would underlie our actions?What highervalue would we place upon human life, upon the human race, at the expense of other forms of life which wouldjustify our taking over a new habitat and altering it to suit our prosperity and desired living conditions? Generally, the animal rights movement respondsto the ongoing colonisation of animal habitats by humans by asking whether the modern Western subject should indeed be the central focus of its ethicaldiscourse. In saying 'x harms y', animal rights philosophers wish to incorporate in 'y' non-human animals. That is, they enlarge the group of subjects towhich ethical relations apply. In this sense such thinking does not greatly depart from any school of modern ethics, but simply extends ethical duties andobligations to non-human animals. In eco-ethics, on the other hand, the role of the subject and its relation to ethics is treated a little differently. The lessradical environmentalists talk about future human generations so, according to this approach, 'y' includes a projection into the future to encompass thewelfare of hitherto non-existent beings. Such an approach is prevalent in the Green Party in Germany, whose slogan is "Now. For tomorrow". For otherssuch as the 'deep ecology' movement, the subject is expanded so that it may include the environment as a whole. In this instance, according to Naess,

'life' is not to be understood in "a biologically narrow sense".Rather he argues that the term 'life' should be used in acomprehensive non-technical way such that it refers also to things biologists may classify as non-living . This wouldinclude rivers, landscapes, cultures, and ecosystems, all understood as "the living earth" (Naess, 1989, p.29). From this perspective the statement 'xharms y' renders 'y' somewhat vague. What occurs is not so much a conflict over the degree of ethical commitment, between "shallow" and "deepecology" or between "light" and "dark greens" per se, but rather a broader re-drawing of the content of the subject of Western philosophical discourseand its re-definition as 'life'. Such a position involves differing metaphysical commitments to the notions of being, intelligence and moral activity. Thisblurring and re-defining of the subject of moral discourse can be found in other ecocentric writings (e.g. Lovelock, 1979; Eckersley, 1992) and in otherphilosophical approaches. [5] In part our approach bears some similarity with these 'holistic' approaches in that we share dissatisfaction with themodern, Western view of the 'subject' as purely human-centric. Further, we share some of their criticism of bourgeois green lifestyles. However, ourapproach is to stay partly within the position of the modern, Western human-centric view of the subject and to question what happens to it in the field ofmoral action when environmental catastrophe demands the radical extension of ethical obligations to non-human beings. That is, if we stick with themodern humanist subject of moral action, and follow seriously the extension of ethical obligations to non-human beings, then we would suggest thatwhat we find is that the utopian demand of modern humanism turns over into a utopian anti-humanism, with suicide as its outcome. One way ofattempting to re-think the modern subject is thus to throw the issue of suicide right in at the beginning and acknowledge its position in modern ethicalthought. This would be to recognise that the question of suicide resides at the center of moral thought, already. What survives when humans no longerexist? There continues to be a debate over the extent to which humans have caused environmental problems such as global warming (as opposed tonatural, cyclical theories of the earth's temperature change) and over whether phenomena such as global warming can be halted or reversed. Ourposition is that regardless of where one stands within these debates it is clear that humans have inflicted degrees of harm upon non-human animals andthe natural environment. And from this point we suggest that it is the operation of speciesism as colonialism which must be addressed. One approach isof course to adopt the approach taken by Singer and many within the animal rights movement and remove our species, homo sapiens, from the centre ofall moral discourse. Such an approach would thereby take into account not only human life, but also the lives of other species, to the extent that the livingenvironment as a whole can come to be considered the proper subject of morality. We would suggest, however, that this philosophical approach can betaken a number of steps further. If the standpoint that we have a moral responsibility towards the environment in which all sentient creatures live is tobe taken seriously, then we perhaps have reason to question whether there remains any strong ethical grounds to justify the further existence ofhumanity. For example, if one considers the modern scientific practice of experimenting on animals, both the notions of progress and speciesism areimplicitly drawn upon within the moral reasoning of scientists in their justification of committing violence against nonhuman animals. The typical line ofthinking here is that because animals are valued less than humans they can be sacrificed for the purpose of expanding scientific knowledge focussed

upon improving human life. Certainly some within the scientific community, such as physiologist Colin Blakemore, contest aspects of this claim andargue that experimentation on animals is beneficial to both human and nonhuman animals (e.g. Grasson, 2000, p.30). Such claims are 'disingenuous',however, in that they hide the relative distinctions of value that underlie a moral justification for sacrifice within the practice of experimentation (cf.LaFollette & Shanks, 1997, p.255). If there is a benefit to non-human animals this is only incidental, what remains central is a practice of sacrificing the

lives of other species for the benefit of humans. Rather than reject this common reasoning of modern science we argue thatit should be reconsidered upon the basis of species equality. That is, modern science needs to ask the question of:'Who' is the best candidate for 'sacrifice' for the good of the environment and all species concerned ? The moralresponse to the violence, suffering and damage humans have inflicted upon this earth and its inhabitants mightthen be to argue for the sacrifice of the human species. The moral act would be the global suicide of humanity.