Giroux, 14 Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University

Aff

Framing

Methods shouldn’t come first – they are a means to an end. Elevating them ignores real world impacts

Fearon and Wendt 2000

(James, Professor of Poli Sci at Stanford, Alexander, Professor of IR at Ohio State, Handbook of International Relations, ed. Carlsnaes, p. 68)

It should be stressed that in advocating a pragmatic view we are not endorsing method-driven social science. Too much research in international relations chooses problems of things to be explained with a view to whether the analysis will provide support for one or another methodological “ism”. But the point of IR scholarship should be to answer questions about international politics that are of great normative concern, not to validate methods. Methods are means, not ends in themselves. As a matter of personal scholarly choice it may reasonable to stick with one method and see how far it takes us. But since we do not know how far that is, if the goal of the discipline is insight into world politics then it makes little sense to rule out one or the other approach on a priori grounds. In that case a method indeed becomes a tacit ontology, which may lead to neglect of whatever problems it is poorly suited to address. Being conscious about these choices is why it is important to distinguish between the ontological, empirical, and pragmatic levels of the rationalist – constructivist debate. We favor the pragmatic approach on heuristic grounds, but we certainly believe a conversation should continue on all three levels.

Extinction outweighs structural violence.

Bostrum, 12

(Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and winner of the Gannon Award, Interview with Ross Andersen, correspondent at The Atlantic, 3/6 [Nick. “We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction”. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/])

Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century. Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them. Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that existential risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of present suffering. Can you explain why? Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards.

HR Link turn

Human rights exists outside of neoliberal economics and can be used as leverage against it.

Moyn, 14

(Samuel – prof of law & history @ Harvard, “A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism,” http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4711&context=lcp)

“Neoliberalism,” especially in leftist discourse, often does massive work in diverse settings of argument, coming close through its overuse to functioning as a call for explanation rather than the real thing. And with its moral charge, it is sometimes deployed like holy water, sprinkled liberally for safety’s sake to ward off evil. Although its rise as an item of discourse and apotropaic talisman reflects understandable anger, it is also symptomatic of explanatory confusion.11 Nonetheless, as David Singh Grewal and Jedediah Purdy indicate in their introduction to this issue, citing an inadequate shorthand for the complex of individualist thought, market solutions, and state retrenchment both domestically and internationally is better than omitting these topics altogether, as American legal scholarship has so far done to its detriment.12 But looking beyond America, the prominence of neoliberalism as a category in scholarship about human rights means that the exact nature of the linkage of the two requires as much attention as the omission of the former from thinking about the latter. “Human rights, as with power and money, became a means to an end of globalizing neoliberal democracy,” Stephen Hopgood remarks in his much noticed recent study, in a commonplace observation.13 And yet, so far, Marxists such as Wendy Brown, Susan Marks, and others have offered indeterminate and unsubstantiated claims that do not suffice to plausibly elevate the chronological coincidence of human rights and neoliberalism into a factually plausible syndrome. For there is a long way from historical “coincidence” or companionship—which there certainly has been between neoliberalism and the human rights phenomenon—to actual causality and complicity. “We would do well to take the measure of whether and how the centrality of human rights discourse might render . . . other political possibilities more faint,” Brown has argued in a classic indictment at the center of the recent commentary.14 Even this displacement theory, about which Brown explicitly invites further reflection rather than offering a strong conclusion, is weak compared to the much stronger accusation of complicity that Brown and others simultaneously offer. Though it seems likely that some displacement of other schemes of justice has indeed occurred thanks to the rise of human rights, I do not think a much stronger claim is likely to work.16 To say that human rights were coincident with or part of the context of neoliberal victory is not only not to say more—it is also not to say much. In particular, it is not to say that neoliberalism has required human rights to make its way in the world—or vice versa. Picayune an agenda as it might seem to specify how weakly related the ascent of human rights appears to the market fundamentalism of our time, I suggest that the finding of only a tenuous relationship between the two has substantial ramifications for judging human rights and their spectacular rise in the last few decades—and thus for assessing the mainstream position. Excusing human rights from causally abetting the free market victory of the neoliberal age is, after all, no defense of their prominence today. It is certainly worth considering the possibility that human rights provide some sort of moral leverage against neoliberal developments. However, even if the value of the normative guidance that human rights provide is undoubted, the trouble is that it amounts to little more than a set of mostly rhetorical admonitions. Worse, by focusing on a minimum floor of human protection, human rights norms prove inadequate in facing the reality that neoliberalism has damaged equality locally and globally much more than it has basic human rights outcomes (which, in some cases, it may indeed have advanced). It is hardly less distressing, but, so far, much more justifiable to conclude that human rights have not made enough of a difference in the short timeframe and global space they share with their neoliberal frère ennemi. They have been condemned to watch but have been powerless to deter. Added to the fact that human rights at least as canonically established have nothing to say about the principal value of equality that neoliberalism threatens, it seems hard to conclude that they are a useful resource in response. If my perspective in between Marxism and the mainstream is adequate, it also follows that there is not much critical or political value in opposing human rights out of understandable outrage at neoliberalism. Instead, the economic transformations of the current era force a heavy burden on those concerned to formulate or to find a more serious analytical account of economic transformations and to offer more robust political resistance than they have marshaled so far. And since human rights idioms, approaches, and movements are unlikely to offer either—and, indeed, do not strive to do so when it comes to inequality—they should stick to their minimalist tasks outside the socioeconomic domain, in part to avoid drawing fire for abetting the stronger companion of their historical epoch.

Human rights is ideologically unrelated to neolib - At most they will win human rights and neolib share a historical period

Moyn, 14

(Samuel – prof of law & history @ Harvard, “A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism,” http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4711&context=lcp)

After all, neoliberal capitalism is a specific episode in the history of capitalism that Marx never knew. More important for my purposes here, today, human rights are often self-consciously presented (though not with great plausibility, as I ultimately argue) as a force that can or will moderate or even reverse the evils of the current form of global market relations. Stereotypically, and to some extent really, human rights legal orders and mobilizational politics have lost their associations to the defense of freedom of contract and private property—there are other bodies of law, and other movements, for that purpose. Rather, in human rights regimes from the United Nations processes to treaty mechanisms, and in human rights movements from Amnesty International to global antipoverty campaigns, the goal is to ameliorate the suffering of others or even insist upon the basis for justified, though minimal, redistribution. Whatever one wants to say about human rights as they exist today, in short, must depart radically from Marx’s early work, and build substantially on his later work. And though Marx could not have theorized either neoliberalism or human rights as they are now known, he might not have been surprised to learn that the chief objection to the latter is that they share the same historical era as the former without unsettling it.