Fiat indoctrinates us to embrace a sovereign view of power that embraces the will to control while mastering obstacles through technocracy -- that trains us to be aggressive intellects.

Weisel's critique of German education prior to world war II points to another danger of traditional argumentation instruction. Like the Nazi doctors, students in traditional argumentation courses are taught "how to reduce life and the mystery of life to abstraction." Weisel urges educators to teach students what the Nazi doctors never learned -- that people are not abstractions. Weisel urges educators to learn from the Nazi experience the importance of humanizing their charges, of teaching students to view life as special, 'with its own secrets, its own treasures, its own sources of anguish and with some measure of triumph.' Trained as technocrats with powerful sensory skills but little understanding, students participating in traditional argumentation courses would have difficulty either grasping or appreciating the importance of Weisel's critique. Similarly, they would have difficulty grasping or appreciating Christian's framework for an ethic of technology an approach that requires above all, openness, trust and care. The notion of conviviality would be particularly alien to these trained technocrats. Traditionally trained debaters are also likely to fail to grasp the complexity of issues.

Trained to view problems in black and white terms and conditioned to turn to "expertise" for solutions, students, and traditional courses become subject to ethical blindness. As Benhabib noted, 'Moral blindness implies not necessarily an evil or unprincipled person, but one who can not see the moral texture of the situation confronting him or her.' These traditional debaters, deprived of true dialogic encounter, fail to develop 'the capacity to represent' to themselves the 'multiplicity of viewpoints, the variety of perspectives, the layers of meaning, etc. which constitute a situation'. They are thus inclined to lack 'the kind of sensitivity to particulars, which most agree is essential for good and perspicacious judgment.' Encouraging students to embrace the will to control and to gain mastery, to accept uncritically a sovereign view of power, and to maintain distance from their own and others 'situatedness,' the traditional argumentation course provides an unlikely site for nurturing guardians of our world's precious resources. It would appear, in fact, that the argumentation course foster precisely the 'aggressive and manipulative intellect bred by modern science and discharged into the administration of things' associated with most of the world's human made perils. And is therefore understandable that feminist and others critics would write so harshly of traditional argumentation of debate.