“Comparative Analysis” Training Session 28 Feb 2014

ISSUE: Often people talk around each other so fail to engage with other side Or fail to explain why the things they say are more important than points from their opponents

USING COMPARATIVES: Why life under your side is better than the alternative option; Why the benefits/ harms you give are more important than those from the other side.

NowSolutionThen

How can you attack this from Opp? Usual cases feature around: – Solution does not lead to desired "then" – Then is bad.

Have to say why then is better than now or vice versa. Often Opposition teams will just explain problems in Then - without explaining why those make it worse than Now. So even if you prove that there desired Then doesn't happen you still have to explain why that Then is worse than Now.

Trade-offs Both sides of the debate are proposing benefits that any reasonable person would consider to be good. However there is a zero sum game: both of these goods cannot be achieved fully, an increase in one comes at a cost to the other. Therefore the debate is about the correct balance of these principles in a moral or ideal situation.

Have to prove that your stakeholder is more important (tends to mean either your group is larger or is effected to a greater degree in terms of being either harmed or benefited more than other groups are.) In analysis directly engage with what your opponents are saying and explain why your stuff is more important.

This is particularly important when weighing up principles. Often you are weighing up some harm versus some concept of freedom. Freedom does get taken away in certain circumstances. Why or why not in this case?

Impacting A lot of this can be solved by simply impacting harms more. As then the other teams can't just shrug it off as not a problem. So how do you do that? – Explain why things are harmful (don’t assume your judge will just believe something is bad) – For example, debaters often just state that this leads to inequality therefore it is bad. But why is this the case?