How To Weigh In Debate

In almost every debate round both sides have a persuasive argument a judge could vote for. From an arbiter’s perspective, this can become confusing. How do they decide what’s more important? Is 100 people dead or 1,000 people falling into poverty worse? It’s the job of the debaters to tip the scales one way or the other.

Types of Weighing

To convince the judges as to which argument they should prioritize, the debate community has created weighing mechanisms, which are standardized words to tell the judge why one side's contention should take priority over the other. In total, there are 10 main types of weighing.

Scope: Scope is how many people or things are affected. For example, a million people losing internet access would have a large scope.
Severity: Severity can be viewed as the opposite of scope. It’s how much a person or thing was impacted. For instance, one person dying would have a high severity.
Reversibility: Reversibility is a sub-category of severity. It’s simply whether something can be undone or not. For example, death is irreversible while an economic shock is not.
Magnitude: Magnitude is the multiplication of severity times scope. While one person dying may have a high severity, it does not have a large magnitude. Similarly, 1,000 people losing internet would also not have a large magnitude.
As a side note, in some parts of the country severity and magnitude are considered the same.
Probability: Probability is how likely an event is to occur. For instance, nuclear war has a relatively low probability while a minor cyberattack has a fairly high one. A word of caution, while the probability of an event is tied to the real world, a debate around an unresponded argument would have an almost 100% chance of happening. So, if a team made an argument that there would be a nuclear war and the other team did not respond to it, the probability would be high.
Timeframe: Timeframe can mean two different things. The first is when the impact occurs and the second is for how long it lasts. If something happens the second resolution is affirmed then it can be weighed on timeframe because it’s more probable. Or, if the impact lasts for centuries then it could be weighed on timeframe because it’s multigenerational.
Urgency: Similar to timeframe, urgency is how pressing the issue is. For instance, solving a war is more urgent than renegotiating a treaty in five years.
Prerequisite: A prerequisite is when one impact comes before another. For instance, economic growth is a prerequisite to welfare expansion because we need a strong economy to be able to fund new programs. Interestingly, a lot of prerequisites can work both ways. A team could argue welfare expansion is necessary to generate a strong economy.
Link-in: The link-in is related to a prerequisite. This is where one impact gains access to the other. I.e. climate change links to poverty.
Short-circuit: In the same family as a prerequisite and link-in, an argument is short-circuited when one impact with a shorter timeframe stops another from happening. For instance, a trade war short circuits economic growth because tariffs increase prices.

How To Think About Weighing

In the end, we can split our weighing mechanisms into 3 main bases: effect, probability, and relational. The effect-based weighing mechanisms like magnitude, scope, reversibility, severity, timeframe (long-term impact), and urgency all deal with how good or bad the impact is on the world. The second is probability arguments like probability and time frame (how soon the impact occurs). They are about how likely the impact is to trigger. Finally, there are the relational impacts, these are the ones that capture or latch onto the other team's impacts, like prerequisite, link-in, and short-circuit.

You can see a diagram of each type of weighing split into their respective categories below.

How do you apply this to a round? Well, the best contention will have the highest amount of severity, be the most probable, and be a prerequisite to their argument. So, a good team will weigh utilizing all three of the buckets.

Even If Statements

In a debate round, you should behave like you are winning every argument. Unfortunately, this attitude doesn’t necessarily extend to the judge's mind. So, to maintain the idea that their argument is untrue and doesn’t even need to be weighed we use even if statements. For instance: “Even if you agree with their argument that allowing students to use AI in class would teach them valuable technology skills it doesn’t matter because it would hinder their mathematics and English proficiency, which are pre-requisites to future learning.

Key Takeaways

Purpose of weighing: Every round has multiple possible arguments a judge could vote for, weighing is how debaters break the clash.
Three types of weighing:
- Effect: How much the impact affects people.
- Probability:The likelihood of the impact occurring.
- Relational: The effect Team A’s impact has on Team B’s.
How to weigh: Attempt to apply a weighing mechanism from each bucket to your argument.
Even if statements: Use even if statements to maintain your perceived confidence while also weighing their arguments!