On “Object Fiat” (Bob Overing)
Conceptual Confusion
I’m not sure I understand what object fiat is, and given how much debate theory I’ve read, I don’t think I’m the only one. A classic example of object fiat is something like “Plan solves China’s human rights abuses; Counterplan: China stops abusing human rights.” This is object fiat, it is said, because the counterplan fiats the object of the plan. Not very helpful.
I don’t always research the scope of negative fiat, but when I do, I turn to my former coach and professor L. Paul Strait’s wonderful article “The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision Making.” Yet while LPS and co-author Brett Wallace address how alternative agent counterplans often slip into unfair object fiat, they offer no definition of the term. They state that “Except for those who believe in ‘negative flexibility’ as a cult-like religion, everyone agrees that the negative should not be able to fiat the object of the plan” (p. A-3). If object fiat is such a clearly unfair tactic, we ought to have a better understanding of what it is.
Next, I consulted my library of theory articles from sources like Argumentation & Advocacy, Contemporary Argumentation & Debate, the Alta Conference books, WFU Debater’s Research Guide, etc. While many articles address counterplan theory and fiat, I could not find a good source explaining object fiat.
Now I’m in deep, and I’m crawling through Cross-X.com forums and very old policy theory blocks to figure out what this is all about. Some forum commenters say counterplans are bad “if they use fiat power to attain their solvency” but that doesn’t help us very much (don’t all counterplans do that to some extent?). Others say it’s when the counterplan doesn’t leave room for solvency objections. But of course, there are always possible solvency objections, so this definition isn’t serviceable either.
Without workable theories in the literature, I turn to the plain meaning of the term object fiat. I understand fiat, but object is not a debate term of art I ever learned in a camp lecture or from a coach or any other source. Are the plan’s objects its terminal impacts? Or any impact that isn’t fiated by the plan? A counterplan could pose very similar problems without fiating the plan’s object, for instance, by abolishing the branches of Chinese government that commit all the human rights abuses. That seems unfair for object-type reasons, but it’s not object fiat! In addition to the line-drawing issues, can an affirmative declare as an object the most common counterplan on the topic, thereby eliminating it as a fair negative option? Of course not, so there must be some general and more principled explanation for what constitutes object fiat.
Let’s start with the paradigm example above: there seems to be broad agreement that fiating away China’s human rights abuses is unfair against a plan that claims to solve those abuses. What explains this unfairness, and can that explanation give us a clearer understanding of object fiat?
Some Suggestions
The most glaring structural difference between the China counterplan and other counterplans is its reliance on an alternate agent.[1] But there are likely some China counterplans that are fair against a USFG actor. An advantage counterplan that has China sign a known, upcoming treaty agreement doesn’t seem too bad, or at least not bad for reasons of object fiat. Further, some same agent counterplans face object fiat problems. For instance, if the plan claims to solve US-China war, a counterplan that fiats ‘the US will not go to war with China’ seems to fall into the realm of object fiat. So, object fiat must go further than the alternate agent problem.
Another candidate is that the China counterplan seems to beg the question implied by a resolution about U.S. relations with China. This is one of the types of abusive fiat forwarded by the great Kentucky coach Roger Solt in his article on the states counterplan. On this view, the counterplan “imagines away the real world context…which the resolution was based upon” (para. 12). This could be an explanation for why some types of object fiat are bad, but certainly not all of them. For one, it makes the legitimacy of object fiat turn on the particularities of the topic (a view cited here), which is very counter-intuitive given its universal castigation. Second, if the affirmative does not rely on the resolutional context to garner offense, there would be little fairness concern.
We could narrow the approach to be concerned with the context on which the affirmative is based, rather than the topic, but this seems over-inclusive. If the affirmative plan has exceedingly weak inherency or impact uniqueness, then a counterplan that neatly solves the problem should be rewarded. E.g., if all the affirmative harms stem from the U.S.’s failure to sign some treaty, which the plan would solve but not fiat, the obvious counterplan to sign the treaty strikes me as potentially legitimate, or at least not presumptively unfair as the label “object fiat” would suggest.
A final approach for why counterplans labeled object fiat are unfair could have something to do with the practicality or plausibility of the counterplan. This is one of the six ways to limit negative fiat identified by Solt, and he cites Dallas Perkins and David Cheshier as two coaches who have proposed theories in this vein. The problem for our purposes is that some counterplans are implausible for reasons that have nothing to do with fiating objects, and perhaps some counterplans that fiat objects (like the treaty example above) are quite practical.
An (Unsatisfying) Answer
We don’t like ludicrous counterplans. We don’t like ones that fiat mindset changes by large groups of people. We don’t like counterplans that propose actions the agent is highly unlikely to take. We don’t like counterplans that dodge the heart of the topic literature or the primary discussion of the affirmative. Sometimes we don’t like counterplans that use alternative agents or different branches of government.
Having listed all these reasons we might find a counterplan illegitimate, I am hard-pressed to see the need for a category called object fiat. My suspicion is that counterplans labeled object fiat are in fact unfair for other, more principled reasons, and no coherent, accepted definition of object fiat exists. The China example is likely unfair because it uses an alternate agent, takes an action that agent is unlikely to take, and is not an option discussed in the topic literature. Not because it uses “object fiat.”
Good conjunctive interpretations are rare, and even rarer in policy debate, so it’s not surprising that another label was invented to describe counterplans that cause a multitude of problems. Should we craft a theory interpretation that draws a principled line between legitimate and illegitimate counterplans? Should we forward a nuanced theory of fiat? Nah, let’s just say “object fiat” and call it a day.
End Notes
[0] Thank you to Alan George for first listening to a draft of this rant.
[1] And this is true for a host of other examples falling under the banner of object fiat. For instance, Strait and Wallace say about some kritik alternatives, “It would be great if every terrorist in the world rejected violence, every criminal embraced love, or every human being ended their fetish with capitalism, but the probability that these would ever occur is nil. This is object fiat at its best” (p. A-5).
