Environmental protection should take precedence over resource extraction

I affirm. Before reading through my framework and contentions I would like to define some of the key terms in this resolution. First, Should: implies a moral obligation. Two are in Conflict: a difference that prevents agreement. Prioritize: designate or treat (something) as more important than other things (Oxford Dictionary). Developing Country: a poor agricultural country that is seeking to become more advanced economically and socially (Oxford Dictionary). Resource Extraction: The process or business of extracting ore, minerals, and natural resources from the ground. Environmental Protection: refers to any activity to maintain or restore the quality of environmental media through preventing the emission of pollutants or reducing the presence of polluting substances in environmental media. The value for the round is morality as implied by the resolution. First, Decision makers, such as the government, must save the larger group. Rakowski writes: The core conviction behind the "ends not means" principle is that normal, blameless human beings are equally valuable, autonomous crea"tures who cannot rightly be used as the tools of other people. But this conviction points in two directions in which Costa and others who have trumpeted the principle (or some related distinction between doing and allowing or positive and negative duties) are loath to go. On one side, it presses toward the consequentialist view that individuals' status as moral equals requires that the number of people kept alive be maximized. Only in this way, the thought runs, can we give due weight to the fundamental equality of persons; to allow more deaths when we can ensure fewer is to treat some people as less valuable than others. Further, killing some to save others, or letting some die for that purpose, does not entail that those who are killed or left to their fate are being used merely as means to the well"being of others, as would be true if they were slain or left to drown merely to please people who would live anyway. They do, of course, in some cases serve as means. But they do not act merely as means. Those who die are no less ends than those who live. It is because they are also no more ends than others whose lives are in the balance that an impartial decision maker must choose to save the more numerous group, even if she must kill to do so. Furthermore Neuro"imaging shows that utilitarianism is the most rational moral theory. Other moral intuitions arise as a result of emotional bias. Greene writes[3] To summarize, people"s moral judgments appear to be products of at least two different kinds of psychological processes. First, both brain imaging and reaction "time data suggest that there are prepotent negative emotion[s]al responses that drive people to disapprove of the personally harmful actions proposed in cases like the footbridge and crying baby dilemmas. These responses are characteristic of deontology, but not of consequentialism. Second, further brain imaging results suggest that "cognitive" psychological processes can compete with the aforementioned emotional processes, driving people to approve of personally harmful moral violations, primarily when there is a strong consequentialist rationale for doing so, as in the crying baby case. The [active] parts of the brain that exhibit increased activity when people make characteristically consequentialist judgments are those that are most closely associated with higher cognitive functions such as executive control (Koechlin et al., 2003; Miller and Cohen, 2001), complex planning ( Koechlin, Basso, Pietrini, Panzer, & Grafman, 1999), deductive and nductive reasoning (Goel & Dolan, 2004), taking the long view in economic decision making (McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen., 2004), and so on. Moreover, these brain regions are among those most dramatically expanded in humans compared with other primates (Allman, Hakeem, & Watson, 2002). The value criterion is maximizing life. The first contention is that not prioritizing environmental protection over resource extraction will lead to environmental damage, which will lead to extinction. BacTech states: To illustrate the severity and impact of mining on land that is not properly reclamated, there are hundreds of thousands of sites around the world that display unnaturally high levels of toxins, such as arsenic, sulfuric acid, and mercury. Massive contamination from chemicals and compounds used in and extracted via the mining process, as well as water produced from mine drainage, affects every aspect of a surrounding ecosystem, from rivers and creeks to forests and farm lands. The contamination from the process of resource extraction is harmful to the ecosystem. The second contention is that not prioritizing environmental protection over resource extraction will lead to violence in developing countries. Downey Bonds and Clark state: Thus, in addition to developing our theoretical argument, we also demonstrate that an important empirical link exists between natural resource extraction and armed violence. To establish this link, we use a recent National Research Council (NRC; 2008) study to identify 10 minerals that are critical to the functioning of the U.S. economy and/or military (platinum, palladium, rhodium, manganese, indium, niobium, vanadium, titanium, copper, and rare earth elements) and then ask whether the extraction of these minerals has involved the use of armed violence at any point in the past 10 to 15 years. We define armed violence as violence and threatened violence perpetrated by military, police, mercenary, and rebel forces, and thus we investigate violent acts such as military and police forces beating, arresting, or firing weapons at protestors, the use of mercenaries to provide mine security, the forced removal of local populations, and the use of forced labor to carry out resource extraction activities.