What do conservative political figures like Ted Cruz, Steve Bannon, Karl Rove and Richard Nixon have in common with liberal politicians like Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, Kamala Harris and Bill Clinton? They all honed their skills of rhetoric, reasoning and persuasion on school debate teams.
That’s no surprise. Excelling in school debate opens many academic and professional doors, conferring prestige and signaling exceptional verbal and logical aptitude. Some of those skills will no doubt be on display at the Democratic presidential primary debate on Tuesday.
But while school debate can be good for aspiring politicians, it may not be good for our politics. In particular, it may contribute to the closed-minded, partisan and self-interested nature of so much of today’s public and political dialogue.
Why? Because school debate ultimately strengthens and rewards biased reasoning.
In traditional debate competitions, teams are assigned at random to argue one or the other side of an issue. Each round, one team is assigned the affirmative view — say, “Recreational drug use should be legalized” — and the other team, the negative. That means teams start with a conclusion, whether they endorse it or not, and work backward from there, marshaling the best arguments they can devise to make that conclusion come out on top.
The goal is not to determine the most reasonable or fair-minded approach to an issue, but to defend a given claim at all costs. This is an exercise not in deliberation but in reasoning with an agenda.
This also happens to be the kind of argumentation we find so corrosive in today’s politics. Politicians and pundits have their favored view and then emphasize the information that fortifies it. Evidence that threatens their position is rationalized away. Problems for the opposing view are hunted for and magnified.
This criticism is not new. The philosopher and logician Willard Van Orman Quine argued that school debate elevates “the goal of persuasion above the goal of truth” and that the strength of a good debater “lies not in intellectual curiosity nor in amenability to rational persuasion by others, but in his skill in defending a preconception come what may.”
School debate reinforces this mode of reasoning. By celebrating those who are most adept at it, schools hold it up as a model form of thinking.
Don’t get us wrong. This style of reasoning can be useful. Legal advocacy, for instance, often requires it. And in preparing to argue both sides of a question, as you do in school debate, you can gain valuable perspective on the topic at hand. You develop the ability to approach a topic from different angles. You might even learn the critical lesson that there is often more to an opposing view than it may initially seem.
Nevertheless, traditional school debate discourages the kind of listening and reasoning that is critical to a healthy democracy. Student debaters don’t deliberate about what they themselves believe, or should believe. They don’t cultivate the disposition to listen to others with the real possibility of changing their minds. On the contrary, they practice listening with eagle ears for opposing points to pounce on. Rather than increasing their comfort with being wrong, they can deepen an attitude of certainty.
School debate doesn’t have to be this way, though. In fact, many schools around the country are gravitating to alternative forms of debate that set the goals of truth and understanding over the goal of persuasion. A good example is the Ethics Bowl.
In the Ethics Bowl, created at the intercollegiate level in 1993 and the high school level around 2012, a team is assigned a question — not a statement or conclusion, as in traditional debate — on a contentious topic, such as “When is the use of military drones morally permissible?” The team then presents and defends whatever conclusion its deliberation has led to. An opposing team and a panel of judges pose questions and raise potential problems, to which the first team responds.
Sometimes the two teams find themselves largely in agreement. When they do, the winner is the team that does the better job of articulating its reasoning, listening and responding to questions, and advancing the collective understanding of the issue at hand.
But disagreement is frequent in the Ethics Bowl, and the discussions are spirited. That’s a good thing. After all, spirited dissent and disagreement are hallmarks of a healthy democracy. Disagreement among citizens is inevitable — about politics, morality, education, religion, nearly everything. What’s crucial is how we disagree, and how we converse and deliberate with those with whom we disagree.
It is precisely when we disagree that it is most critical for our thinking to be clear and our dialogue to be charitable and scrupulous. But disagreement is also when we’re most likely to get irritated, defensive and impatient. The more at stake in the conversation, the more difficult it is to remain poised, thoughtful, open to being wrong and ready to acknowledge fair points from the other side.
Disagreeing constructively is a skill — one of the most difficult and important there is. In encouraging students to practice this skill, the Ethics Bowl fosters what may be the most important intellectual virtue of all: openness to changing your mind.
There is something of a stigma in our culture about changing your mind, especially in politics. If you do, you are often seen as weak or branded a “flip-flopper.” The problem is, holding steadfast to a belief in the face of sound objections or contrary evidence stops conversation. It’s dogmatic and stubborn. Having the courage to admit when you might be wrong, on the other hand, helps move conversations toward meaningful resolutions.
At this seemingly broken political moment, our country’s future may depend on our politicians becoming more comfortable doing that.
Jonathan Ellis is an associate professor of philosophy and the founding director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Francesca Hovagimian, a former Ethics Bowl competitor and coach, is a law student at the University of California, Berkeley.