Davis,+Ryan

Name: Ryan Davis Affiliation: The Bronx High School of Science

Like everybody else, I think the most important thing about judging is to not intervene. The debate is not about my views on the topic or on philosophy or my views on debate itself. Debate should be what the debaters make of it, and I think my role is to respect their decisions about how the debate should go. This sounds trivial but it isn’t: it offers an explanation for why my in-round decisions should always be about avoiding intervention. “Intervention” is just what happens when the outcome of the round is determined by the judge rather than the debaters. Non-intervention respects the debaters’ control over their round. I may differ from some other judges about how best to avoid intervening, but I try to work it out as best I can.

The next most important thing you might know about me as a judge is that I do care about debate. It’s tough to make time to attend a few tournaments, and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t care about participating. I try hard to make the right decision every time. I still remember the rounds I lost, and it still matters.

Now about more conventional questions. I used to say just that speed was fine, which is still true. I can more or less keep up. However the time has come that I should confess that I am not the fastest, and in any case I may be less concerned with the details than some. But still speed is fine. I do analytic moral and political philosophy, so I don’t think much of critical or continental literature. That means I do have a bias, but because non-intervention is the most important thing I do my best to avoid letting it affect decisions. I like theory debate fine. In fact I think theory can make for very interesting conversations. I have some truth-testing intuitions, but I’ve lately been persuaded that ‘truth-testing’ is an inadequate ‘paradigm,’ or way of deciding which debater wins the round. Feel free to ask me for details if you think it will matter. Topicality is fine. My default is to assume that ‘competing interpretations’ is a better standard than alternatives to it. To me, the higher order principle in all of this is fairness. If we treat one debater unfairly, then we take control of who wins the round away from the debaters, and so giving it to someone else. Evidence is presumably good if it bears on a claim that requires evidence. But, for purposes of the round I can be talked into taking the opposing views.

One bit of strategy: I’m often frustrated by debaters who go for too much in the last rebuttal. Why do people do this? It doesn’t matter at all if you win the debate two or three times. You don’t get extra credit for winning the round independently on multiple issues. But trying to win in multiple, independent ways means that you spend less time on any one of them, and that makes it harder to win any one of them. I think debaters go for multiple strategies in the last rebuttal because they mistrust the judge. “Maybe the judge will think I should have gone for theory! (or case!).” So then the debater goes for everything. I think you’d be more likely to win by making sure you've won the round once. People don’t realize how much there is to say about any one issue. Think it over. Make choices. Your future stories about old rounds will be better.

My personal background: I did LD and policy in high school, coached at Mountain View (Arizona) through college, and debated parliamentary debate a few times as a grad student. By November, 2010 I will have a PhD in political philosophy from Princeton. Most of my academic work is within contemporary Kantian theory. I write about ethics and political philosophy.