Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher, whose contributions to existing theories on ethics and ethical responsibility have drastically shifted the perspectives surrounding complicity and have reoriented the ways in which people seek to understand their sense of commitment towards disenfranchised people in society. He argued that the individual’s sense of responsibility must be an essential component of one’s identity. For Levinas, this responsibility must also precede their recognition of the latter's identity. Not doing so, could allow the individual to be discriminative about the ways in which they seek to exercise their sense of commitment. His framework does not argue in favour of an invisibilisation of cultural identities, it seeks to position responsibility before the individual's recognition of cultural differences.

This framework of ethical responsibility has been questioned by critics and scholars like Rachel Walsh who oppose the ways in which Levinas seeks to decontextualize the cultural encounter between the privileged and the oppressed. For Walsh, “the language in which the individual responds to the other” and the ways in which they seek to manifest their feeling of responsibility are precisely determined by the cultural contexts in which they reside, and the individual must condition their sense of commitment through an active recognition of identities within a cultural context. For Walsh, recognition of the self and the oppressed individual's identity must precede their sense of commitment.

The late Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly‘s book, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, addresses the question of finding meaning in the contemporary world. The preface sets out the book’s project:
The world doesn’t matter to us the way it used to. The intense and meaningful lives of Homer’s Greeks, and the grand hierarchy of meaning that structured Dante’s medieval Christian world, both stand in stark contrast to our secular age. The world used to be, in its various forms, a world of sacred, shining things. The shining things now seem far away.
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The first chapter, entitled “Our Contemporary Nihilism,” focuses on the angst caused by the many choices we now have compared to previous generations. In response people typically adopt a self-confident persona to mask their insecurity, or they become paralyzed by their obsessions and addictions. But neither mollifies our existential anguish, as anxiety pervades western civilization, as our former religious moorings have been lost. In the Middle Ages, for better or worse, nearly everyone believed that God created them and determined their fate. One could choose to turn away from God and sin in medieval times, but being an atheist or rejecting religious ethics altogether wasn’t an available choice. But today ethical prescriptions are tenuous, and nihilism is a viable option. The faith that once comforted does so no longer—today even fervent believers face existential questions.
But Dreyfus and Kelly present us with a third option: the ability to find your own sacred meaning in the everyday— the ritual of drinking your daily cup of coffee, the music that puts you in a trance of pure bliss, or the sacred attachment you have with a sports team. They describe this as a practice of neo-polytheism, where we imbue sacred meaning in the flow of our daily lives. One where our desires, and fancies come to define our own personal God. Yet this everyday is often informed by the vices of capitalist consumption, of falling into the trap of advertisement and vanity. By finding meaning in your own individual niche, one also risks erasing the embedded moral conflicts, and inequalities that accompany the expensive world of coffee and sports. And they also hold the risk of losing touch with community, and the collective force of sharing religious experience in an institutionalized setting.

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s -- most starkly in the 21st century of late stage capitalism -- as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.”

'Closure-at-first-sight' is described as 'an instant, intuitive vision of how your relationship with someone will end'. This does not reveal the circumstances that lead to that ending.

There’s growing recognition in the field of psychology that people are experiencing distress over climate change. More than 40% of Americans felt “disgusted” or “helpless” about climate change, according to a survey published by researchers at Yale University. A 2020 poll from the APA found that more than half of respondents were somewhat or extremely anxious about the effects of climate change on their own mental health. Though not officially classified in the DSM-5, the term therapists use to classify and treat mental illnesses, there’s a name for this state of despair that has emerged from academic texts and media since as recently as 2007: eco-anxiety.

In some ways, climate change anxiety is a rational response, said Leslie Davenport, a therapist based in Tacoma, Washington. “Eco-anxiety is a natural response to a threat. And this is a very real threat,” Davenport said. Yet it can also debilitate. In college, I began a campaign to shut down fracking in Los Angeles County. Within months, I burned out. Constantly contemplating the impact of fracking on our atmosphere and communities was making it difficult for me to function at a basic level.

Because of this tension between eco-anxiety’s role as a rational but potentially debilitating response, there’s no clear, standard definition as to when eco-anxiety is unhealthy, if it ever is. “That’s one of the questions we really need to be asking,” Clayton said. “Anxiety is not pleasant to experience, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s an emotional signal that we need to be paying attention.

Definition: Medicalization is the process of labelling ‘eco-anxiety’ as an illness requiring formal diagnosis of symptoms, and prescribed treatment through biochemical, psychiatric, or intervention by formal medical apparatuses such as admittance in a hospital.

"Carbon pricing” is a market-based strategy for lowering global warming emissions. The aim is to put a price on carbon emissions—an actual monetary value—so that the costs of climate impacts and the opportunities for low-carbon energy options are better reflected in our production and consumption choices. There are two widely supported strategies for carbon pricing.

A carbon tax directly imposes a (progressive) tax on each unit of greenhouse gas emissions - directly establishing a price for carbon consumed - and gives firms (and households, depending on the scope) an incentive to reduce pollution whenever doing so would cost less than paying the tax.

A cap-and-trade model, on the other hand, sets a maximum level of pollution - a cap - and distributes emissions permits among firms that produce emissions. Companies must have a permit to cover each unit of pollution they produce. They can obtain these permits either through an initial allocation or State led auction, as well as trade them on secondary markets, creating a carbon price. Whilst the maximum pollution quantity is set in advance, the trading price of permits fluctuates, becoming more expensive when demand is high relative to supply (for example when the economy is growing) and cheaper when demand is lower (for example in a recession). A price on pollution is therefore created as a result of setting a ceiling on the overall quantity of emissions.

The Stampede Trail is a route made famous by Christopher McCandless, who walked it in April 1992. Many people now know about McCandless and how the 24-year-old idealist bailed out of his middle-class suburban life, donated his $24,000 in savings to charity, and embarked on a two-year hitchhiking odyssey that led him to Alaska and the deserted Fairbanks City Transit bus number 142, which still sits, busted and rusting, 20 miles down the Stampede Trail. For 67 days, he ate mostly squirrel, ptarmigan, and porcupine. After a few months, a moose hunter found McCandless’s decomposed body in a sleeping bag inside the bus, where he had starved to death.

This tragic story was told by Jon Krakauer in the January 1993 issue of Outside and later in his bestselling 1997 book, Into the Wild. The book, and a 2007 film directed by Sean Penn, helped elevate the McCandless saga to the status of modern myth. And that, in turn, has given rise to a unique and curious phenomenon in Alaska: McCandless pilgrims, inspired by his story, who are determined to see the bus for themselves. "The Magic Bus" has become a pilgrimage destination for trekkers who camp at the vehicle, some of whom have gotten into their own difficulties or even died due to the Teklanika River. They camp at the bus for days, sometimes weeks, write essays in the various logbooks stowed inside, and ponder the impact that McCandless’s anti-materialist ethic, free-spirited travels, and time in the Alaskan wild has had on how they perceive the world.

From almost the moment he was found, the meaning of Chris McCandless's life and lonely death has been fiercely argued. The debate falls into two camps: Krakauer's visionary seeker; a romantic figure inspired by what they see as his free-spirited idealism; or, as many Alaskans see it, an unprepared person who had fundamentally misjudged the wilderness he'd wanted so desperately to commune with.

The Life of George Washington” (1934) is a San Francisco school mural painted by Victor Arnautoff; it was one of countless artworks created by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) initiative under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to visualize a new roadmap toward national excellence under the adage, “Search for a usable American past.” Now, 85 years after its creation, administrators at the school where the painting resides have decided that there is nothing “usable” in Arnautoff’s images. George Washington High School has decided to paint over the 1,600-square-foot mural.The city’s school board voted unanimously to approve the repaint. Why? Because of its blunt retelling of history. Across 13 frescos, the painter renders an unvarnished portrait of Washington as a slave owner who incentivized settlers and troops to destroy Native American populations and land. One landscape includes a pack of soldiers painted in greyscale walking by the fallen corpse of an Indigenous person.Reactions to this gruesome scene have been mixed. Opponents of the mural have described it as a symbol of racial animus. In voting for its destruction, the school described their decision as a form of reparations for historic racial injustices against African Americans and Native Americans. While they recognize the need to keep history complicated, the anti-muralists also see the Arnautoff painting as a decontextualized daily problem for marginalized students and staff. The Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists, and others put together by the district, concluded in February that Arnautoff’s work “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” Black people and Native Americans in the school district have asked for the mural’s removal as a way to address continuing racial inequality.But according to a report by the New York Times, many other students favor the fresco. One student wrote, “The fresco shows us exactly how brutal colonization and genocide really were and are. The fresco is a warning and reminder of the fallibility of our hallowed leaders.” Art historians and alumni have also come to the painting’s defense, saying that it must be preserved as an example of WPA art and a frank representation of how cruel early America’s leading figures could be.

The Met Gala is an annual event organised by Vogue to raise funds for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was started in 1948 and is widely considered to be one of the most luxurious, extravagant and exclusive events in the world. This year, the value of a ticket for the event was $35,000 and while some invited attendees don’t have to pay for this ticket, many believe that the cost of attending this event reflects an unnecessary extravagance. While the event is often viewed as a reflection of fashionable high culture, many attendees decided to show up wearing clothes that defy existing ideas surrounding what is and isn’t “fashionable”. From Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to Cara Delevingne and Carolyn B. Maloney, several politicians and celebrities decided to wear clothes that explicitly seek to make a progressive socio-political statement. According to Judith Thurman, this year’s Met Gala raises questions about the position of “protest fashion” in contemporary society. She argues that women throughout history have used fashion as a means of expressing their resistance to oppressive institutions and frameworks.

However, several individuals have pointed out that the attempt to take progressive politics inside an event like the Met Gala has ultimately added to the event’s legitimacy. Furthermore, while the event was going on, several Black Lives Matter protestors were being arrested for calling out the police for its unwillingness to protect marginalized communities. Given the nature of these events, several activists have questioned the validity of carrying progressive political statements into spaces that are potentially repeating the very cycle of oppression that the protestors outside the event are fighting against.

A century ago the eminent Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to the viceroy of India. The “time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation”, Tagore wrote in outrage as scores of peaceful protesters were massacred in Jallianwala Bagh. He would now “stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen”. The 1919 atrocities in Amritsar jolted the Nobel laureate into accepting that that his Knight Commander of the British Empire could not be treated as unconnected to the bloodied realities of that empire’s operations.

David Olusoga is a British Nigerian popular historian, writer, broadcaster, presenter and film-maker. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. He was awarded an OBE for his services to history and community integration. Accepting his Order of the British Empire, the public historian David Olusoga, has insisted that while “the empire was an extractive, exploitative, racist and violent institution”, the fact that “there isn’t an empire any more” changes things completely. Olusoga suggests that, by acknowledging the “incredible achievements of black and Asian Britons”, OBEs can be seen as a defeat of racism

In response to the increasingly large number of senior citizens being relegated to their care, who go unvisited by family and are isolated by age and illness, UK care homes are planning to deploy robots, in an attempt to allay the widespread loneliness felt by them and boost their mental health. The wheeled machines will initiate rudimentary conversations, play residents’ favourite music, teach them languages, and offer practical help, including medicine reminders. These robots can hold simple conversations, have basic emotional responses, and be programmed to people’s interests. These robots do not replace human employees in these facilities, of which there often aren’t enough, but are meant to supplement their care.

Anti-vaccine taxes will require those unvaccinated against Covid-19 [excluding those who had medical conditions preventing them to] to pay a surcharge while entering and using public spaces like restaurants, (public transport) etc.

Clarification : For the purpose of this debate, those who remain unvaccinated do so entirely out of choice (as opposed to say inaccesibility). (This is not an entirely unrealistic assumption, because of where the motion is situated)

National legislation requires French broadcasters to give all 11 candidates in the presidential race exactly the same airtime. And it’s not just about how much they talk – it’s also about how much they are shown on camera or how much journalists talk about them.
This means that political debates will include say, all 11 candidates contesting an election - regardless of their political trajectory or experience - having to speak within the 3 hours allocated to the debate.

"Ain't I a Woman?" is a speech, delivered extemporaneously, by Sojourner Truth, (1797–1883), born into slavery in New York State. Sometime after gaining her freedom in 1827, she became a well-known anti-slavery speaker. Her speech was delivered at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio, on May 29, 1851. If there is a canon of African-American women’s rhetoric, Sojourner Truth’s speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” is a central text in that collection. It was an aptly chosen name, as illustrated by her speech, in which she at once refutes the prevailing myth that women are weaker than men while challenging social definitions of womanhood—which relies upon ideas about white women’s femininity and purity.
Most people are familiar with the 1863 popular version of Sojourner Truth's famous, “Ain’t I a woman” speech but they have no idea that this popular version, while based off of Sojourner’s original 1851 speech, is not Sojourner's speech and is vastly different from Sojourner’s original 1851 speech. This popular but inaccurate version was written and published in 1863, (12 years after Sojourner gave the "Ain't I a woman" speech), by a white abolitionist named Frances Dana Barker Gage. Curiously, Gage chose to represent Sojourner speaking in a stereotypical 'southern black slave accent', rather than in Sojourner’s distinct upper New York State low-Dutch accent. In an issue of the Kalamazoo Daily Telegraph, an article states that Truth prided herself on “fairly correct English, which is in all senses a foreign tongue to her. . . . People who report her often exaggerate her expressions, putting in to her mouth the most marked southern dialect.”

For comparison, this is an excerpt from the text:
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!”

Gage’s version:
“Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place eberywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages or ober mud-puddles, or gives me any best place. - And ar’n’t I a woman? Look at me. Look at my arm. I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me.”

'Femicide' refers to the murder of a female because of her sex. In Latin America femicide has a legal meaning, too - since 2007 15 countries have recognised it as a distinct category of killing. The maximum for femicide in Nuevo León is 70 years, 30 years longer than for other murders.

Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, aged 31, of an aggressive cervical cancer. Months earlier, doctors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, had taken samples of her cancerous cells while diagnosing and treating the disease. They gave some of that tissue to a researcher without Lacks’s knowledge or consent. In the laboratory, her cells turned out to have an extraordinary capacity to survive and reproduce; they were, in essence, immortal. The researcher shared them widely with other scientists, and they became a workhorse of biological research. Today, work done with HeLa cells underpins much of modern medicine; they have been involved in key discoveries in many fields, including cancer, immunology and infectious disease. One of their most recent applications has been in research for vaccines against COVID-19.
Lacks was a Black woman. The hospital where her cells were collected was one of only a few that provided medical care to Black people. None of the biotechnology or other companies that profited from her cells passed any money back to her family. For decades after her death, doctors and scientists repeatedly failed to ask her family for consent as they revealed Lacks’s name publicly, gave her medical records to the media, and even published her cells’ genome online.

Babasaheb Ambedkar had made a historic declaration on October 13, 1935 at Yeola (in Nashik district) of his resolve to renounce Hinduism. As a follow-up of this declaration and in order to have a blueprint for the tasks ahead, a conference titled Mumbai Ilakha Mahar Parishad (Mumbai Province Mahar Conference) was organised from May 30 to June 1, 1936 at Mumbai. In the conference, Ambedkar made a detailed and passionate speech, which was published under the title “Mukti Kon Pathe?” (“Which Path to Salvation?”).
In “Mukti Kon Pathe?” Ambedkar outlined two considerations in changing religion – existential and spiritual. In explaining the existential consideration, he mainly indicated the pitiful plight of Dalits. They suffered atrocities at the feeblest violation of the caste code as perceived by the caste Hindus.
Coming to the existential aspect of this problem, he observed that the lack of strength of Dalits was the root cause of the perpetuation of this conflict. Dalits did not possess any of the three strengths human beings are expected to possess, namely, the strengths of numbers, wealth and education. If Dalits relied upon their own strength, they could not hope to escape their prevailing miserable state. He thus justifies his call for conversion as an existential necessity for Dalits. It followed that the religion they convert to should have a sizeable community in the country, with Islam, Christianity and Sikhism implicitly constituting his zone of consideration.
The spiritual consideration in the change of religion was related with enhancing the worth of an individual. Since the Hindu religion did not have any place for an individual, it could not provide spiritual solace to anyone. According to Ambedkar, the real objective of a religion should be the spiritual development of individuals: “[B]irth of an individual is not for service of the society, it is for his or her own emancipation.” He saw the necessity of three things for the development of an individual – compassion, equality and freedom, which he saw in Buddhism.

In 1984, Kanshi Ram founded the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) with the intention of politically representing Dalits and other minorities in the country. He maintained that his party’s struggle for justice and equality will encompass the concerns of Dalits, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and several other religious and social minorities. The current president of the party, Mayawati will soon be contesting for the 2022 UP Legislative Assembly elections. In the past, Mayawati has found some electoral success by following what Paul R. Brass calls the “coalition of extremes” strategy, through which she advocated for a sense of unity between Dalits, Muslims and Brahmins. In the 2007 Assembly elections, BSP had come to power by winning 206/403 constituencies after persistently advocating for a Dalit-Muslim-Brahmin “brotherhood”. Motivated by these events, the BSP is currently trying to repeat the strategy that brought them electoral success several years ago. On 18th July 2021, Mayawati announced a “Brahmin Sammelan” (Brahmin conference) through which she accused the ruling BJP government of exploiting the Brahmin community by falsely earning their trust and ignoring their requirements thereafter. Mayawati is actively making these claims in a context where the Brahmins and the Thakurs are at odds with one another given that the nominated CM belongs to the latter. Furthermore, out of the total of 7 BJP MPs that were inducted into the Council of ministers by the Prime Minister, only one was a Brahmin. These moves have motivated the BSP and other opposition parties in UP like the Samajwadi Party to start lobbying for votes from the Brahmin voter base.

Many however, believe that the BSP’s proposed strategy is destined to fail because of the polarised nature of Indian politics today. According to Hisam Siddiqui, the party’s strategy is currently at risk of alienating several Muslims within the state who might instead jump ship to support the Samajwadi Party who had also found electoral success in 2012. Furthermore, this strategy is also alienating several Dalit scholars and activists who believe that the political ambitions of the party currently are directly contradicting the intention with which it was started. Despite all these criticisms, the party leaders are confident and feel like their inability to incorporate the Brahmin voter base has allowed the BJP to construct an atmosphere of fear and hatred within UP. They feel that it is incumbent upon them to reach out to the Brahmin voter base so that they may realise that their interests need not be in alignment with a casteist framework of society.

Context-1: In the past, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) had explicitly articulated a sense of pan-Tamil, trans-national consciousness, which would allow Sri Lankan Tamilians to lay claim to a culture which was seemingly being hegemonised by their Indian and other non-Sri Lankan counterparts. The symbols used to represent their struggle were explicitly derived from a semi-mythologised “golden age” of Tamil civilisation (Sangam era) and significant attempts were made at emphasising a notion of transnational solidarity. After the defeat of the LTTE in 2009, the leaders of the Tamil political alliances of Sri Lanka have actively limited their demands for an independent nation state. Instead, alliances like the TNA (Tamil National Alliance) and TNPF (Tamil National People’s Front) have rallied with the intention of securing greater levels of autonomy by supporting a federal structure that accommodates their demand for “regional self-rule"". The leaders of the political alliances have also limited their expression of trans-national solidarity, fearing that doing so would further legitimise the claims of the majoritarian Sinhala nationalists, who sought to characterise them as outsiders without a legitimate claim in Sri Lanka. Instead, they have decided to assert their distinctiveness as a community with a historic Tamil presence and heritage within Sri Lanka itself.

Context-2: On several occasions, the Sri Lankan government has arrested various members of the political alliances for actively memorialising historic Sri Lankan Tamil activists like Lt. Col. Thileepan. The government has also limited any attempts at commemorating the Tamilians who had lost their lives at the hands of the Sri Lankan government during their struggle with the LTTE. Such acts of repression by the Sri Lankan government have significantly hampered the ability of Tamil leaders and activists at emphasising their distinctive sense of self as a community within the nation. While many believe that the claim to a trans-national, pan-Tamil identity allows for a greater visibility of the Sri Lankan Tamil cause by encouraging international expressions of solidarity, others believe that this approach would allow several non-Sri Lankan Tamils to misunderstand, dilute and appropriate their struggle within the Nation. As of today, Palermo City, Italy has recognised the “genocide of Eelam Tamils perpetrated by the Sri Lankan state” and a few months ago, the British foreign secretary had expressed his desire to secure a level of funding that would allow a thorough investigation of the war crimes in Sri Lanka."

Stoicism was a school of philosophy that was founded by Zeno of Cyprus in Athens during the Hellenistic period. The stoics believed that the expression of emotions like fear, anger and grief emerged from an error of judgement, and they often advocated for a sense of rational “stoic calm” that would allow the individual to carefully respond to their situations. Stoics never actively vouched for a sense of passivity, rather they believed that an ideal political leader could influence significant change by exercising stoic self-restraint and censoring their “emotional excesses”. The stoics however primarily focused on advising the individual about navigating their lives in the world as it exists. Its opposition to emotional expression has been a key aspect that has worried several scholars about how it disproportionately privileges certain types of leaders over others.