Resolved: Placing political conditions on humanitarian aid to foreign countries is unjust.

Judge: ADreamOfLiberty
Win awarded to: Nerd Politico
Reasoning:
To be honest I find a lot of problems with both side's arguments.

First off Nerd Politco is correct about the BoP. He only needs to find one exception to break the rule. In round 3 admin said it was a total outlier, but that does not matter. If it is possible that justice is best served by placing political conditions on humanitarian aid in any circumstance the resolution is negated.

However, he appears to forget this point (again in round 3) as he says "The only way to make it better and more humanitarian."

He needs only one instance, but seems to want to grab the entire set. As a rule the idea that giving people food, medicine, and clothing is going to hurt them (lower utility) is absurd.

The only scenario where this is plausible would be if they don't really get the food, medicine, and clothing. Some corrupt thieves (private or public) in the country get them instead.

In which case the political conditions and the humanitarian aid may become the one and only solution to either problem, since saying "You better give this to your people" or "You better stop guerrillas from taking this from the starving masses" are in fact political conditions that must be met in order for that aid to reach the people and do more good than harm.

Since NP's third round speech touches on most everything I will make some further observations from it:

1. Nerd Politco also says in round three that people will be more likely to get out of poverty if they have the framework to do so. I am an extremist capitalist so this sits well with me, but I deny the implication that aid in any way inhibits the formation of productive economic structures.
Only a Keynesian style mindset could go from free stuff to economic harm. Any nation that is starving is going to have huge demand for food, unless you're setting a banquet every night the demand will be sufficient to make farming profitable. These people wouldn't be starving if there wasn't something else standing in the way of effective local food production.
More importantly, you can't invest in anything if you're nothing but skin and bones sitting on the floor of your hovel, or dead....

Now if the things standing in the way of productive frameworks are political, then placing political conditions could solve those problems (at least in theory). However I don't think Nerd Politico makes this point effectively. As with the rest of the debate, scope is barely mentioned making it almost impossible for me to determine whether he is referring to a singular hypothetical (or real world) scenario or making categorical statements.

2. Nerd Politco mentions admin's about slave owner arguments, I did not understand that and disregarded it. If it meant what NP seems to think it meant, it is especially incorrect given that admin made a point about how the people are not asked. If a government does not ask it's people you cannot do anything about that while respecting the sovereignty of the government.

3. Nerd Politco says the fact that political conditions are accepted out of fear but this doesn't matter. It seems similar to admin's contention that any possible negative effects of aid don't matter because of a right to life.

Here especially is where I find another area of conflation and confusion in the debate. There is insufficient distinction between a government and its people.

A government may accept only out of fear, but the people as admin pointed out are not given the choice. They do not act out of fear or friendship but merely hope that the collective persons who have the power to feed them will do so.

Fear in a government can be a bad thing but it does not necessarily reflect a subsequent resentment on the part of the populace, indeed the thing the government fears most often is that the starving people will tire of that government very quickly.

I had a very difficult time choosing a winner because the conditions for victory were never defined and agreed upon. Con refers to utility, and Pro refers to a natural human right to life and both try to link this to justice. In my opinion rights and justice are by definition related where utility is not, but the way Pro presents a right to life seems to agree with the definition of utility as 'most happiness' so far as it is understood that compassion or whatever is to alleviate suffering and death is the worse loss to both utility and empathy.

Although it was far more vague than I would have liked, I believe Con did allude to the fact that political conditions could also be the conditions necessary for humanitarian aid to actually have their intended effect on the suffering population.

P.S. I really don't care about the actual facts about Tanzania or what not. In matters of justice and morality (that is matters of rights and utility if you believe in such things) you establish the principle and then you judge particular cases, you cannot work in reverse because there is no empirical justice-o-meter to refer to.

Feedback:
I alluded to some of the problems in my reasons for decision. To state the three big ones explicitly:

1. Justice, the very core of the resolution is not given a mutually agreed on precise objective definition.

2. Scope is confused and ignored by both sides.

3. Distinctions between a government and its people are confused.

The solution to number one would probably be to agree on such a thing before the debate, or make it a condition to accepting.

As for the scope problems. Sometimes scope is implicit and clear enough. This was not one of those times. Using phrases like "in that case" or "in all cases", quantifiers like "all", "some", and "none" are something you should be doing naturally in your thinking.

In a debate like this which is easily subject to confusion I would take it even farther, and give proper names like "Case A" or "Scenario 1" when speaking of a hypothetical or real world limited scope. Especially Nerd Politico should have done this when examining his postulation that humanitarian aid (as sent) could be detrimental.

I would also advise admin to be careful not to project arguments onto his opponent that were not made. Nothing in Cons speech suggested he did not believe people had rights in these distressed nations (something that your final video and the comment about slave owners indicated). Rather it seemed he was claiming using that as justification does not work if your aid isn't actually protecting their rights but leading to further violation.

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2 users rated this judgement as exceptional

Judge: nzlockie    TOP JUDGE
Win awarded to: Nerd Politico
Reasoning:
I'm ultimately awarding the win to CON because I agree that his role was to provide one scenario where imposing political conditions on aid made the aid more just.

I feel that he met his "maximisation of utility" criteria that [in some scenarios] imposing political conditions on the aid leaves the people better off than they would have been without those conditions imposed.

I looked at PRO's ethics violation accusation and while I agree that the Tanzania example was not what CON had made it out to be, I didn't see that there was enough in it to discard the rest of his case.

Feedback:
On the positives - good debate guys. These video debates are little trickier to score because I had to keep pausing and rewinding bits to make sure I was following you correctly. But it was pretty cool anyway.

PRO: I have a few bits of feedback for you, which I hope will clarify where and why you lost me in this debate...
1) Your first round was solid but I felt that you could have been clearer on some of your points. I had to rewind your third reasons several times until I realised that the concept you were explaining was basically blackmail. Given that it's a video format and most people won't take the time to rewind, I'd encourage you to choose your words to make the concepts as clear as possible. (I know you know this, so I guess I'm saying that, for me, this time it didn't work.)

2) I get that you were trying to avoid using Values and Criterions but once you put one out there, I'd have appreciated some clarification on it. CON explained his ones and I found that helpful. I still don't KNOW that I have the right idea of what you mean by, "Humanitarian aid without Political Conditions".

3) Phrasing. I read some stuff on LD Debate judging and it said that in this style you don't score on the speaking style - although it made the point that this might affect how clearly the judges understand or follow the case. In this instance I felt that although you had the better speaking style, you could have used pauses and emphasis to better highlight your main points. (Didn't take marks off for this though!)

4) Attacking the other side's examples. The last minute Tanzania thing was a bit of an eye opener for me. If you'd brought that up earlier, and attacked it harder I think I might have been more swayed. Due to the fact that CON only had to bring one scenario up where political conditions are just, your side was the hardest to argue. If you had shot down CON's Tanzania thing really early, I wouldn't have had as much time to picture the scene he was painting.

CON:
1) Your speaking style was REALLY hard for me to follow. You spoke SO fast and were clearly reading from some paper. This meant that I lost almost ALL audio queues as to which parts were more important to listen to - the impact statements, headings and elaborations all kind of blurred into one.
As mentioned above, I didn't score you on that, but I have to say it REALLY impacted my ability to follow your case. I would highly recommend memorising at least most of your points and concentrating on the delivery to make sure that the judges are getting the full impact of your points.
On the positive, it DID make your side sound more confident and assured as when I flicked over to PRO's videos, the speed difference was so dramatic. So I think you need to probably just slow it down a little and bring more of that emphasis in there. And look at me at least 50% of the time!

2) If you're going to quote evidence from a specific source, I really want that source to be given at the same time. Just throwing a name at me without any context is no good, I'm automatically going to assume that that evidence is less credible because it seems to sceptical old me that you're hiding something.

3) In your second rebuttal of PRO's first round points, I only had you successful on the first one. Your insistence that ALL the countries who receive aid are non-democratic and assumption that all the countries that give aid ARE democratic was risky. PRO never pulled you up on this so you got away with it, but I have to say it bugged me every time you brought it up.

4) I had you losing both CX rounds. The first round was purely down to the fact that I felt PRO did an exceptionally good job answering your questions but the second one I found it really hard to follow which question you were responding to. I haven't scored you off for that because I think a big part of it might be the way CX rounds are done here, (it's the first time after all!) but maybe you could look at that for future online CX rounds, making it more clear which question you're responding to?

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3 users rated this judgement as constructive