Lincoln-Douglas Debate from First Principles

A short primer for the activity.

Ethan Nathaniel Elasky

Chapter Contents

The Counterplan

How do counterplans win?

I’ll start with the fundamentals with this one. The most fundamental tenet underpinning a counterplan is that it has to pose an “opportunity cost” to the affirmative. A counterplan must prove a world that excludes part or all of the aff is net desirable. For instance, let’s say an aff plan is

A counterplan might say something like “Counterplan: we should go to In-N-Out and get burgers.” Say you argue that the counterplan solves the taste advantage, because In-N-Out is just as tasty as McDonalds. Say you also read a disadvantage that says *McDonalds is very unhealthy compared to In-N-Out*. This debate seems pretty easy to resolve, right? The counterplan solves the aff advantage while avoiding the disadvantage of unhealthiness. Easy neg ballot. This counterplan is called an advantage counterplan because it solves an aff advantage. Simple enough.

A counterplan is composed of three parts: text, solvency, and competition.

The above counterplan’s text is *Counterplan: we should go to In-N-Out and get burgers*.

The solvency is the argument you made about how the counterplan solves the taste advantage. You need qualified evidence to make solvency arguments; in this case, since it’s a matter of personal preference, you’re qualified. But on most topics, debaters aren’t qualified to make arguments in place of carded evidence. It’s not your burden as the affirmative to prove that the counterplan doesn’t solve—it’s the negative’s burden to prove that it DOES.

In this case, competition is established by the disadvantage. It doesn’t make sense to eat McDonalds when In-N-Out is just as tasty and is healthier. This is what we call “competition by net benefits.”

Based on these three points, it’s now possible to tell when counterplans are incomplete.

If a counterplan is missing a text then it should be thrown out.

If a counterplan is missing a solvency argument, you should point out that it’s unlikely to solve because no qualified expert says it will. (Note: if you’re affirmative, read your own advantage or solvency evidence. Your evidence might advocate for an advantage counterplan plank!)

If it’s clear the counterplan doesn’t compete, the affirmative should make a permutation. Legitimate permutations include all of the affirmative and some/all of the counterplan. For example, imagine this debate:

This counterplan clearly doesn’t compete—there’s no cost that the counterplan poses to doing the affirmative.

So the 1ar should say:

The counterplan can also “link to the disadvantage”:

And perm do both can also “shield the link”:

One last thing to discuss on the topic of counterplan permutations is *perm do the counterplan*. This argues that the counterplan is either the plan or is plan-plus (for the more mathy among us, the plan is a subset of the counterplan). Imagine the following scenario:

The judge does not have any way to resolve this debate besides believing that the negative has the burden of proving an opportunity cost to doing the affirmative. This is the reason for why the aff gets “presumption” against counterplans (in contrast, the negative gets presumption if they defend the status quo. Presumption answers the question of who the judge should vote for, absent unique offense on either side. The reason why presumption “flows neg” is because the aff’s job is to prove the plan would positively impact the status quo. The neg wins if the aff wouldn’t improve anything because change is scary. More discussion on presumption will be below.)

So we’ve spent a bunch of time discussing what a counterplan is and brainstorming permutations against different counterplans. The last thing I’ll talk about is dealing with crummy counterplans, e.g. ones that are just a text with nothing else.

Echoing above, there are always a few arguments that are key to make:

What is conditionality?

Most judges believe that negs can read multiple advocacies in a single 1NC and can spontaneously choose to stop defending any of them at any time (a.k.a. kicking an advocacy). This is called conditionality. There are myriad justifications for conditionality, which you can find here (TODO).

I’m going to quickly run through some implications and alternatives to conditionality.

One implication of conditionality is called judge kick. This means that the judge can also “kick” neg advocacies if it would be beneficial to them. The most basic justification for this is that the aff should not win if they are just better than the counterplan; they should also have to beat the status quo. After all, the aff’s burden is to prove that their advocacy is a good idea, not merely that the counterplan is bad.

Affirmatives can read theory arguments about how conditionality and/or judge kick are unfair/uneducational. I’ll get into these later. They’ll often also propose alternatives, namely unconditionality and dispositionality.

Unconditional counterplans are unkickable. Dispositional counterplans are kickable under certain conditions, which some judges think the negative is free to define. The most common version is that the neg can kick the counterplan if the aff makes a perm or a theory argument. Affs say dispositionality is a happy medium that allows for aff choice rather than neg choice.

Judges are usually OK with up to 2 conditional advocacies. After that, it becomes much easier for affs to win conditionality bad theory debates.

I’ll elaborate further on conditionality in the theory section and on types of counterplans in the Strategy chapter as well as the Counterplan Examples section.

If you want to get a head start on conditionality, read this post by Scotty. Also this HS Impact podcast, starting around 57:45.

Counterplan Types

The next part of this chapter is about counterplans. There are a bunch of different types of counterplans which I’ll go over here.

The first and most obvious type of counterplan is the advantage counterplan. Advantage counterplans target aff advantages (hence the name). They are always run in conjunction with a disad to prove the AFF/the perm is bad. For an example, see the 6th OFF in Harvard MS’s [1NC] from the 2017 college policy topic on climate. The counterplan solves climate change, which is the AFF’s advantage, while avoiding the disadvantage (the 4th OFF).

One important counterplan concept is the plan-inclusive counterplan (PIC). This type of counterplan advocates the plan except for some component of it. For example, say the aff says eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels. The neg in this instance says eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels except for the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund. The NEG coopts the aff’s offense and becomes preferable by subtracting a bit from the plan. PIC is often used as a verb in debate. The counterplan I just introduced PICs out of the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund. PICs are strategic against both policy and critical strategies which I’ll explain more later.

Another type of counterplan is the process counterplan. These counterplans do the same action as the aff but PIC out of the aff’s mechanism/process/method. For instance, rather than passing a bill straightforwardly through Congress, the NEG might suggest that a bill first go through a process of negotiated rulemaking that then passes through Congress. You’d still need an answer to the perm. The general rule is that the closer the counterplan is to the aff, the harder it is to find a substantial net benefit. This means that net benefits for process counterplans, which are definitionally very similar to the aff, are often obscure and contrived. One very good process counterplan is the 2nd OFF in this 1NC from Berkeley GW’s Semifinals round at the 2017 National Debate Tournament.

There are several other types of counterplans that get lumped in with the process counterplan.

One is the agent counterplan. This suggests the aff be done through a different agent (i.e. the Supreme Court rather than Congress). Different topics lend themselves to different agent counterplans. On a topic about public schooling, a smart counterplan might be the 50 States counterplan, which advocates for state rather than federal action. Other topics (e.g. immigration) lend themselves to executive branch/agency action.

We should also discuss internal net benefits. Internal net benefits are answers to the permutation that can’t prove the aff bad independently of the counterplan. This might be a bit confusing, so I’ll parse it out a bit more. Let’s say the neg reads an executive counterplan and a politics DA versus a Congress aff. If the aff reads a compelling DA to executive action, the neg would be smart to kick the counterplan and just go for the DA in the 2NR. In this case, the neg can kick the counterplan and go for the disad as a reason the aff is bad. Now let’s say the neg reads this ICJ counterplan, which is the 4th off. This counterplan says that ICJ action is good for reasons beyond the aff’s action is good. Its answer to the perm is that the aff’s passage would moot an ICJ case, precluding the ruling’s positive benefits. This is a classic example of a counterplan with an internal net benefit. There’s no disad to the aff, only a reason why the counterplan would be even better.

Plan-inclusive counterplans and process counterplans (especially those with internal net benefits) are often theoretically suspect. They usually involve less preparation, especially if they are generic (meaning they apply to several/all AFFs), and they steal much of the aff’s offense. Good affs are written to have answers to all process counterplans (i.e. “ONLY the aff’s process solves the impacts we’ve isolated”). I’ll discuss this more in the next chapter.