Debate is Losing its Impact

Aahana Gupta | 4 min read

If you ask any debater what Starr ‘15 is, chances are, they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about. Starr ‘15 is a good example of what the standard PF impact looks like – warranted, quantifiable, and most importantly, large. Impact debates can often feel like a race to the top, with each team trying to prove why voting for them will prevent the greatest amount of deaths. Link chains grow longer, arguments grow more outlandish, and extreme events begin to seem normal and necessary to debate. In this context, evidence like Starr is like gold, and extinction impacts become king. 

When writing my cases, I can recall countless times where I would find an impact card and think, “This number is just not big enough.” Throughout my time debating, the standard for what is an acceptable impact has risen from hundreds of deaths to thousands, then to millions, and finally, to extinction. I am certain this is not a unique phenomenon – I’ve had conversations with other debaters and coaches where we have deemed certain impacts to be “not strategic” or, on the flip side, to be “a really good impact.” But what is good about millions of people dying?

Debaters have a bad habit of only considering real issues (such as war, climate change, famine, etc.) as arguments to be compared and won, without ever considering how appalling some of the claims we are making truly are. We forget that the people in our impact cards are real. They aren’t just a nebulous number we can utilize to show a judge why our position is correct – they have families, dreams, and lives, which are actively being ruined by the issues that we are minimizing. In the same way that over-exposure to violent headlines can desensitize us, debaters are so over exposed to horrific impact scenarios that we stop feeling empathy for the people we are arguing about. This apathy can even spill over into other parts of our lives, making us more prone to minimizing tragic headlines when we come across them in real life.

Only debating extreme scenarios also causes any issues that don’t directly result in billions of deaths to be swept under the rug. Problems such as food insecurity, domestic violence, or other hard-to-measure problems are rarely discussed, even though these are the problems that people are more likely to face in their daily lives.  While saving 500 people from dying might not seem like a “strategic” argument, that doesn’t make their deaths any less tragic or important to discuss or at least research, even if it wouldn’t necessarily help us in a debate round. If a problem is not "strategic", little focus is given on how the policies we debate can aid in its prevention. 

Of course, I understand that debate is an activity where for most people, the goal is to win. Extinction scenarios are deeply entrenched in debate and I don’t expect them to go out of style anytime soon. However, I would like to encourage us to think deeply about the articles that we are reading, and remember that the deaths in our evidence aren’t just numbers on a screen – there are real lives being lost as a result of the problems we are talking about. Maintaining our ability to empathize with these people won’t just make us more persuasive (and therefore better) debaters; it also just makes us better humans. Additionally, don’t just focus all your research on conventional big-stick impacts; take some time to read news covering smaller-scale issues. It’s far more likely that these are the problems impacting you and your community, and these are the problems you can most directly take action to solve. Convincing your judge to vote for you probably won’t stop a nuclear war or climate change from happening, so maybe we should spend a little more time learning and working on issues where we can actually make a difference. 

Bibliography

Zhao, Washington. “How Debate Shaped My Worldview.” Medium, 6 June 2019, medium.com/@washingtonzhao/how-debate-shaped-my-worldview-da68d18af61a. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.

Robert T. Mueller, “The More News Headlines We See, the Less We Care.” Psychology Today, 2024, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma/202408/the-more-news-headlines-we-see-the-less-we-care. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.