Coercion Disad

1NC

Public transit investment is unjustifiable government coercion and a slippery slope to full scale social engineering

O’Toole, 10 - senior fellow at the Cato Institute (Randal, “Fixing Transit The Case for Privatization”, 11/10, http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/PA670.pdf)

Since people do not live in patterns that are conducive to successful big-box transit, transit agencies have become social engineers, trying to use the power of government to coerce people into living patterns that will lead them to ride these expensive trains more frequently. Enticements come in the form of subsidies to so-called transit-oriented developments: high-density, mixed-use developments that combine housing with shops and are usually located near a rail station. 74 Coercion comes in the form of urban-growth boundaries that drive up the cost of singlefamily housing, which most people prefer. 75 These policies have not been successful: despite these policies, rail transit continues to carry less than 1 percent of passenger travel in Portland, San Diego, San Jose, Sacramento, and other regions that opened their first new rail lines after 1976. 76

Individual liberty comes first -- rejecting every instance of coercion is key.

Petro ‘74 [Sylvester, Professor of Law at NYU, Toledo Law Review, Spring, p. 480, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200304/0783.html]

However, one may still insist, echoing Ernest Hemingway - "I believe in only one thing: liberty." And it is always well to bear in mind David Hume's observation: "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." Thus, it is unacceptable to say that the invasion of one aspect of freedom is of no importance because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That road leads to chaos, tyranny, despotism, and the end of all human aspiration. Ask Solzhenitsyn. Ask Milovan Dijas. In sum, if one believed in freedom as a supreme value and the proper ordering principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with undying spirit.

***Links***

2NC Link: Transportation Investment

Federal transportation investment distorts the free market and uses force to undermine private property rights

Carson, 10 – senior fellow and holder of the Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory at the Center for a Stateless Society (Kevin, “The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies,” The Freeman, November, http://www.thefreemanonline.org/features/the-distorting-effects-of-transportation-subsidies/)

The State and the Corporation It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the dominant business model in the American economy, and the size of the prevailing corporate business unit, are direct results of such policies. A subsidy to any factor of production amounts to a subsidy of those firms whose business models rely most heavily on that factor, at the expense of those who depend on it the least. Subsidies to transportation, by keeping the cost of distribution artificially low, tend to lengthen supply and distribution chains. They make large corporations operating over wide market areas artificially competitive against smaller firms producing for local markets—not to mention big-box retailers with their warehouses-on-wheels distribution model. Some consequentialists treat this as a justification for transportation subsidies: Subsidies are good because they make possible mass-production industry and large-scale distribution, which are (it is claimed) inherently more efficient (because of those magically unlimited “economies of scale,” of course). Tibor Machan argued just the opposite in the February 1999 Freeman: Some people will say that stringent protection of rights [against eminent domain] would lead to small airports, at best, and many constraints on construction. Of course—but what’s so wrong with that? Perhaps the worst thing about modern industrial life has been the power of political authorities to grant special privileges to some enterprises to violate the rights of third parties whose permission would be too expensive to obtain. The need to obtain that permission would indeed seriously impede what most environmentalists see as rampant—indeed reckless—industrialization. The system of private property rights . . . is the greatest moderator of human aspirations. . . . In short, people may reach goals they aren’t able to reach with their own resources only by convincing others, through arguments and fair exchanges, to cooperate. In any case, the “efficiencies” resulting from subsidized centralization are entirely spurious. If the efficiencies of large-scale production were sufficient to compensate for increased distribution costs, it would not be necessary to shift a major portion of the latter to taxpayers to make the former profitable. If an economic activity is only profitable when a portion of the cost side of the ledger is concealed, and will not be undertaken when all costs are fully internalized by an economic actor, then it’s not really efficient. And when total distribution costs (including those currently shifted to the taxpayer) exceed mass-production industry’s ostensible savings in unit cost of production, the “efficiencies” of large-scale production are illusory.

Federal planning undermines freedom and destroys choice – ending transit subsidies is necessary

Roth, 10 - civil engineer and transportation economist. He is currently a research fellow at the Independent Institute (Gabriel, “Federal Highway Funding”, June, http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/transportation/highway-funding

One damaging policy direction involves efforts to reduce individual automobile travel, which will harm the economy and undermine mobility choice. Another damaging policy direction is the imposition of federal "livability" standards in transportation planning. Such standards would federalize land-use planning and pose a serious threat to civil liberties and the autonomy of local communities. Finally, ongoing federal mandates to reduce fuel consumption have the serious side effect of making road travel more dangerous. The federal government pursues these misguided goals by use of its fiscal powers and regulatory controls, and by diverting dedicated vehicle fuel taxes into less efficient forms of transportation. This essay reviews the history of federal involvement in highways, describing the evolution from simple highway funding to today's attempts to centrally plan the transportation sector. It describes why federal intervention reduces innovation, creates inefficiencies in state highway systems, and damages society by reducing individual freedom and increasing highway fatalities. Taxpayers and transportation users would be better off if federal highway spending, fuel taxes, and related regulations were eliminated. State and local governments can tackle transportation without federal intervention. They should move toward market pricing for transportation usage and expand the private sector's role in the funding and operation of highways.

2NC Links: Government Action

Coercively funded policies tradeoff with more productive voluntary solutions and must be rejected

Younkins, 2000 (Dr. Edward W. Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business Administration at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, “Civil Society: The Realm of Freedom,” No 63, 6-10-2000, http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000610-11.htm, )

Recently (and ironically), government projects and programs have been started to restore civil society through state subsidization or coercive mandates. Such coercion cannot create true voluntary associations. Statists who support such projects believe only in the power of political society – they don't realize that the subsidized or mandated activity can be performed voluntarily through the private interaction of individuals and associations. They also don't understand that to propose that an activity not be performed coercively, is not to oppose the activity, but simply its coercion. If civil society is to be revived, we must substitute voluntary cooperation for coercion and replace mandates with the rule of law. According to the Cato Handbook for Congress, Congress should: before trying to institute a government program to solve a problem, investigate whether there is some other government program that is causing the problem ... and, if such a program is identified, begin to reform or eliminate it; ask by what legal authority in the Constitution Congress undertakes an action ...; recognize that when government undertakes a program, it displaces the voluntary efforts of others and makes voluntary association in civil society appear redundant, with significant negative effects; and begin systematically to abolish or phase out those government programs that do what could be accomplished by voluntary associations in civil society ... recognizing that accomplishment through free association is morally superior to coercive mandates, and almost always generates more efficient outcomes. Every time taxes are raised, another regulation is passed, or another government program is adopted, we are acknowledging the inability of individuals to govern themselves. It follows that there is a moral imperative for us to reclaim our right to live in a civil society, rather than to have bureaucrats and politicians « solve » our problems and run our lives.

State intervention into the market makes corporate tyranny possible and disempowers individuals from resisting both public and private institutions

Peacott, 1 (Joe, Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade, “Chomsky's Statism: An Anarchism for the Next Millennium?” 7-19-2001, http://world.std.com/~bbrigade/chomsky%27s%20statism, )

Private corporate power exists only because it is protected by the state. Government reduces competition and limits entry into the market place with various licensing and regulatory schemes, and grants monopolies and subsidies to favored businesses. Chomsky himself concedes that corporations would not be successful if forced to submit to market discipline, and that markets are under attack. But in addition to actively promoting concentration of private corporate power, the government prevents people from defending their own interests in disputes with corporations with its police powers and laws that disarm working people. Such disempowerment of people makes them unable to resist the power of public institutions as well, allowing the state to tax, regulate, and imprison people at its whim. Abolishing state power is a more effective and libertarian method of limiting private and public tyranny than is increasing the scope of the federal government. Only anarchist means have any hope of producing anarchist ends.

All government actions are coercive.

Browne, 1995 [Harry, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, “Why Government Doesn't Work,” p.10-11]

The distinctive feature of the government is coercion – the use of force and the threat of force to win obedience. This is how government differs from every other agency in society. The others persuade; government compels. When someone demands that government help flood victims, he is saying he wants to force people to pay for flood relief. Otherwise, he’d be happy to have the Red Cross and its supporters handle everything. When someone wants government to limit the price of a product, he is asking to use force to prevent people from paying more for something they want. Otherwise, he would simply urge people not to patronize those he things are charging too much. When Congress passes a bill mandating “family leave,” it forces every employer to provide time off for family problems – even if its employees want the employer to use payroll money for some other benefit. Otherwise, employers and employees would be free to decide what works best in each situation. Nothing involving government is voluntary – as it would be when a private company does something. One way or another, there is compulsion in every government activity: - The government forces someone to pay for something; - The government forces someone to do something; or – The government forcibly prevents someone from doing something. There is no other reason to involve government.

***Impacts***

2NC Impacts – Atrocities

Government coercion is responsible for the worst atrocities in history – every coercive policy moves the U.S. closer to the nightmares of Cambodia, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany

Browne, 95 (Harry, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, Why Government Doesn’t Work, p.66-67)

The reformers of the Cambodian revolution claimed to be building a better world. They forced people into reeducation programs to make them better citizens. Then they used force to regulate every aspect of commercial life . Then they forced office workers and intellectuals to give up their jobs and harvest rice, to round out their education. When people resisted having their lives turned upside down, the reformers had to use more and more force. By the time they were done, they had killed a third of the country's population, destroyed the lives of almost everyone still alive, and devastated a nation. It all began with using force for the best of intentions-to create a better world. The Soviet leaders used coercion to provide economic security and to build a "New Man" - a human being who would put his fellow man ahead of himself. At least 10 million people died to help build the New Man and the Workers' Paradise. But human nature never changed-and the workers' lives were always Hell, not Paradise. In the 1930s many Germans gladly traded civil liberties for the economic revival and national pride Adolf Hitler promised them. But like every other grand dream to improve society by force, it ended in a nightmare of devastation and death. Professor R. J. Rummel has calculated that 119 million people have been killed by their own governments in this century. Were these people criminals? No, they were people who simply didn't fit into the New Order-people who preferred their own dreams to those of the reformers. Every time you allow government to use force to make society better, you move another step closer to the nightmares of Cambodia, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. We've already moved so far that our own government can perform with impunity the outrages described in the preceding chapters. These examples aren't cases of government gone wrong; they are examples of government-period. They are what governments do-just as chasing cats is what dogs do. They are the natural consequence of letting government use force to bring about a drug-free nation, to tax someone else to better your life, to guarantee your economic security, to assure that no one can mistreat you or hurt your feelings, and to cover up the damage of all the failed government programs that came before.

2NC Impacts – D-Rule

Coercion is not justified to even decrease the net violation of rights

Pilon, 1 (Roger, Vice President for Legal Affairs and Director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, “Two Kinds of Rights,” 12-6-2001, www.cato.org/current/terrorism/pubs/pilon-011206.html, )

As the Declaration of Independence says, the main business of government is to secure rights, but legitimate government can't do it by any means. It can't violate rights in the name of securing them. That frames the issue. Between those boundaries—and given a world of uncertainty—the devil is in the details. Governments too restrained leave rights exposed. By contrast, societies that trade liberty for security, as Ben Franklin noted, end often with neither.

2NC Impacts – Linear

Each new step of coercion must be resisted – it moves us one step further along the road of oppression

Browne, 1995 (Harry, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, Why Government Doesn’t Work, p.65-66, )

Escalation Each increase in coercion is easier to justify. If it's right to force banks to report your finances to the government, then it's right to force you to justify the cash in your pocket at the airport. If it's right to take property from the rich to give to the poor, then it's right to take your property for the salt marsh harvest mouse. As each government program fails, it becomes "necessary" to move another step closer to complete control over our lives. As one thing leads to another - as coercion leads to more coercion - what can we look forward to? • Will it become necessary to force you to justify everything you do to any government agent who thinks you might be a threat to society? • Will it become necessary to force your children to report your personal habits to their teachers or the police? • Will it become necessary to force your neighbors to monitor your activities? • Will it become necessary to force you to attend a reeducation program to learn how to be more sensitive, or how not to discriminate, or how to avoid being lured into taking drugs, or how to recognize suspicious behavior? • Will it become necessary to prohibit some of your favorite foods and ban other pleasures, so you don't fall ill or have an accident - putting a burden on America's health-care system? Some of these things - such as getting children to snitch on their parents or ordering people into reeducation programs - already are happening in America. The others have been proposed and are being considered seriously. History has shown that each was an important step in the evolution of the world's worst tyrannies. We move step by step further along the road to oppression because each step seems like such a small one. And because we're told that each step will give us something alluring in return-less crime, cheaper health care, safety from terrorists, an end to discrimination - even if none of the previous steps delivered on its promise. And because the people who promote these steps are well-meaning reformers who would use force only to build a better world.

The impact is linear – the stronger the government becomes the more liberty is lost

Bovard, 95 (James, journalist for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, p.333-334, )

Liberty by itself will not create an ideal society. As Friedrich Hayek observed, "The results of freedom must depend on the values which free individuals pursue." Unfortunately, the more powerful government has become, the more likely the people's values are to be debased. Current tax and welfare policy maximizes the rewards for dependency and the penalties for self-reliance. There is a great deal that people can do to help themselves and to help their neighbors and those in need. But the more powerful government has become, the more people devote their attention to Washington rather than to their own efforts. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859: the most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government .6 We have paid dearly for idealizing the state. There is no virtue in denying the law of gravity, and there should be no virtue in denying the limitations of government. Good intentions are no excuse for perpetual failure and growing oppression. The more we glorify government, the more liberties we will lose. Freedom is largely a choice between allowing people to follow their own interests or forcing them to follow the interests of bureaucrats, politicians, and campaign contributors. This is the soul of the debate between liberty and pseudopaternalism, between letting people build their own lives and forcing them to build their lives as politicians dictate.

Each rejection of government coercion and endorsement of non-aggression can help change the system

Dr. Ruwart, 93 (Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, Senior Scientist at a major pharmaceutical firm and a former Assistant Professor of Surgery at St. Louis University Medical School, Healing Our World: The Other Piece of the Puzzle, p.281-282, )

CHOOSING YOUR PATH If you've read this far, you are undoubtedly interested in seeing at least some aspects of non-aggression implemented. Several ideas may seem more relevant to you than others. If you are wondering whether a lone individual like yourself can make a difference, please be assured that you can. Even the smallest contribution can be pivotal. My favorite story illustrating this point is about a blacksmith who failed to put the final nail in a horse's shoe. For lack of a nail, the horse lost his shoe and went lame. The rider, who was carrying critical news to his king, had to continue on foot. As a result, he reached his sovereign too late. Without this important information, the king lost the battle he was fighting and the kingdom fell to invaders. The humble black-smith was pivotal to the safety of the kingdom. Never doubt that your contribution is just as important. Remember that the family and friends who talk with you about the win-win world possible through non-aggression will in turn talk to others, who will share the good news. Like a chain reaction, your message of hope will spread throughout our country and the world, bearing fruit in the most unexpected ways. If you do nothing more than extol the virtues of non-aggression to those around you, you will have done much toward manifesting it! Of course, you needn't stop there. The many groups cited above would welcome your participation. Are there any that excite you? Would you like to join a political campaign or speak on college campuses? Do you perceive a need for other strategies that you could initiate on your own or with others? Can you implement non-aggressive solutions in the midst of aggression-through-government, much like Guy Polheus and Kimi Gray did (Chapter 11: Springing the Poverty Trap)? All these things-and more-are needed to help others recognize that non-aggression is in every-body's best self-interest. We each have a part to play, a gift to the world that will one day be reflected back to us as better world. Our world is a joint creation. We all have the power to affect those around us profoundly. Each of us through our own inner wisdom can identify the piece of the puzzle that we can lay in the mosaic. Every piece is needed to construct the whole; never doubt that what you can do, however small it may seem to you, is essential. I urge you to embrace whatever aspect of non-aggression seems most valuable to you and appropriate to your unique talents. Whether you work behind the scenes or in the limelight, rest assured that the world will take notice. Whatever way you feel moved to participate is a gift you give to yourself and others. Let me be the first to thank you for making the world a better place!

2NC Impacts – Value to Life

There is no value to life in the affirmative’s framework

Hayek, 60 (F.A., Nobel Prize winner for Economics, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960, p.20, )

By “coercion” we mean such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another. Except in the sense of choosing the lesser evil in a situation forced on him by another, he is unable either to use his own intelligence or knowledge or to follow his own aims and beliefs. Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another. Free action, in which a person pursues his own aims by the means indicated by his own knowledge, must be based on data which cannot be shaped at will by another. It presupposes the existence of a known sphere in which the circumstances cannot be so shaped by another person as to leave one only that choice prescribed by the other.

***Affirmative Answers***

2AC

The ends justify the means

Isaac 2 (Jeffrey, Professor of PoliSci @ Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD Yale, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent Magazine Vol 49 Issue 2)

As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. It is assumed that U.S. military intervention is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is a response. The status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist violence abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through brutality and repression. This requires us to ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order. But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how diplomacy or international law [it] can work effectively to address the problem at hand. The campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it to contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

In the face of extinction you have to weigh consequences - outweighs all else

Bok 88 (Sissela Bok, Professor of Philosophy @ Brandeis University, 1988, Applied Ethical Theory, ed. Rosenthal and Shehadi, pg. 203)

The same argument can be made for Kant’s other formulations of the Categorical Imperative: “So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means”; and “So act as if you were always through your actions a law-making member in a universal kingdom of Ends.” No one with a concern for humanity could consistently will to risk eliminating humanity in the person of himself and every other or to risk the death of all members in a universal Kingdom of Ends for the sake of justice. To risk their collective death for the sake of following one’s conscience would be as Rawls said, “irrational, crazy,” And to say that one did not intend such a catastrophe, but that one merely failed to stop other persons from bringing it about would be beside the point when the end of the world was at stake. For although it is true that we cannot be held responsible for most of the wrongs that others commit, the Latin maxim presents a case where we would have to take such a responsibility seriously – perhaps to the point of deceiving, bribing, even killing an innocent person, in order that the world not perish. To avoid self-contradiction, the Categorical imperative would, therefore, have to rule against the Latin maxim on account of its cavalier attitude toward the survival of mankind. But the ruling would then produce a rift in the application of the Categorical Imperative. Most often the Imperative would ask us to disregard all unintended but foreseeable consequences, such as the death of innocent persons, whenever concern for such consequences conflicts with concern for acting according to duty. But, in the extreme case, we might have to go against even the strictest moral duty precisely because of the consequences.

This is particularly true for policymakers

Ignatieff 4 (Michael, Carr Professor of Human Rights @ Harvard, Lesser Evils, p. 18-19)

As for moral perfectionism, this would be the doctrine that a liberal state should never have truck with dubious moral means and should spare its officials the hazard of having to decide between lesser and greater evils. A moral perfectionist position also holds that states can spare their officials this hazard simply by adhering to the universal moral standards set out in human rights conventions and the laws of war. There are two problems with a perfectionist stance, leaving aside the question of whether it is realistic. The first is that articulating nonrevocable, nonderogable moral standards is relatively easy. The problem is deciding how to apply them in specific cases. What is the line between interrogation and torture, between targeted killing and unlawful assassination, between preemption and aggression? Even when legal and moral distinctions between these are clear in the abstract, abstractions are less than helpful when political leaders have to choose between them in practice. Furthermore, the problem with perfectionist standards is that they contradict each other. The same person who shudders, rightly, at the prospect of torturing a suspect might be prepared to kill the same suspect in a preemptive attack on a terrorist base. Equally, the perfectionist commitment to the right to life might preclude such attacks altogether and restrict our response to judicial pursuit of offenders through process of law. Judicial responses to the problem of terror have their place, but they are no substitute for military operations when terrorists possess bases, training camps, and heavy weapons. To stick to a perfectionist commitment to the right to life when under terrorist attack might achieve moral consistency at the price of leaving us defenseless in the face of evildoers. Security, moreover, is a human right, and thus respect for one right might lead us to betray another.

Life has intrinsic and objective value achieved through subjective pleasures---its preservation should be an a priori goal

Kacou 8 (Amien, Published in the Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 4, No 1-2 (2008), “WHY EVEN MIND? On The A Priori Value Of “Life”,” http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/92/184)

In contrast, questions as to the instrumental value of pleasure, even in its most vulgar concept, do not seem likely to cause a problem—even though pleasure can be theorized to have an (external) instrumental value, such as a biological function for instance. (In the vulgar concept, pleasure is a necessarily discrete, temporary experience, which can even be seen as a distraction from “higher” pursuits.) That is because there is “immediacy,” so to speak, in the value of pleasure: it has a dimension more akin to that of what we might call a “final” good, a thing good in or for itself. Indeed, one needs not contemplate anything behind pleasure to value it: it has intrinsic (direct, internal) value. In contrast, the same cannot be said about the value of worry or fear—which expresses security interests. The reason for that might be this: pleasure is itself a form of satisfaction of desire; worry or fear is not. Worry or fear is not worth having (better yet, worth not having) unless it is conducive to something else. If the value of pleasure in its vulgar concept is ever questioned at all, it is typically by comparison with value that is supposed to exist outside of it, the pursuit of which might happen to come into conflict with the pursuit of pleasure. But, that some value can be found in pleasure (i.e., that it is “found good”—that all people who have it must like it to some extent) is beyond reasonable dispute. Therefore, we can use the concept of pleasure as a sufficient representation of something we value. Furthermore, that manner of finding things good that is in pleasure can certainly not exist in any world without consciousness (i.e., without “life,” as we now understand the word)—slight analogies put aside. In fact, we can begin to develop a more sophisticated definition of the concept of “pleasure,” in the broadest possible sense of the word, as follows: it is the common psychological element in all psychological experience of goodness (be it in joy, admiration, or whatever else). In this sense, pleasure can always be pictured to “mediate” all awareness or perception or judgment of goodness: there is pleasure in all consciousness of things good; pleasure is the common element of all conscious satisfaction. In short, it is simply the very experience of liking things, or the liking of experience, in general. In this sense, pleasure is, not only uniquely characteristic of life but also, the core expression of goodness in life—the most general sign or phenomenon for favorable conscious valuation, in other words. This does not mean that “good” is absolutely synonymous with “pleasant”—what we value may well go beyond pleasure. (The fact that we value things needs not be reduced to the experience of liking things.) However, what we value beyond pleasure remains a matter of speculation or theory. Moreover, we note that a variety of things that may seem otherwise unrelated are correlated with pleasure—some more strongly than others. In other words, there are many things the experience of which we like. For example: the admiration of others; sex; or rock-paper-scissors. But, again, what they are is irrelevant in an inquiry on a priori value—what gives us pleasure is a matter for empirical investigation. Thus, we can see now that, in general, something primitively valuable is attainable in living—that is, pleasure itself. And it seems equally clear that we have a priori logical reason to pay attention to the world in any world where pleasure exists. Moreover, we can now also articulate a foundation for a security interest in our life: since the good of pleasure can be found in living (to the extent pleasure remains attainable),[17] and only in living, therefore, a priori, life ought to be continuously (and indefinitely) pursued at least for the sake of preserving the possibility of finding that good. However, this platitude about the value that can be found in life turns out to be, at this point, insufficient for our purposes. It seems to amount to very little more than recognizing that our subjective desire for life in and of itself shows that life has some objective value. For what difference is there between saying, “living is unique in benefiting something I value (namely, my pleasure); therefore, I should desire to go on living,” and saying, “I have a unique desire to go on living; therefore I should have a desire to go on living,” whereas the latter proposition immediately seems senseless? In other words, “life gives me pleasure,” says little more than, “I like life.” Thus, we seem to have arrived at the conclusion that the fact that we already have some (subjective) desire for life shows life to have some (objective) value. But, if that is the most we can say, then it seems our enterprise of justification was quite superficial, and the subjective/objective distinction was useless—for all we have really done is highlight the correspondence between value and desire. Perhaps, our inquiry should be a bit more complex. We may have to think beyond the fact that bare life has some value a priori—the fact that there is some value in any life—(which basically gets us back to the fact that we already have some desire for it or that we can have pleasure in it), and consider the possibility that there might be some value in not living also, and that it might be greater than or cancel out the value we find to be primitively characteristic of life. (This would not be an a posteriori or circumstantial comparison, nonetheless, because life and death are basically logical extensions of one another—like “p” and “not-p.”)