This Case Document is meant to be an example of cases which teams could have run at CNDF Nationals 2024. This document is not intended to be considered the “right” case for any of these motions, many other arguments may exist. The purpose of this document is to help teams who debated at CNDF Nationals 2024 reflect on their performance in the rounds, and use these cases to learn so that they can debate even better in the future. These cases are simply a skeleton for you to build off of, as all the contentions contained within should be run with many additional lines of analysis. This document is intended to be completely free, so you should not have paid for it in any capacity. If you have any thoughts about this resource or would like to reach out with any questions, please feel free to do so at: seedtournaments@gmail.com
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This house, as authors and copyright holders, Would actively support and encourage the creation of fan fiction.
Government
Framing:
1: This helps promote the brand. More engagement with the franchise, characters, and world of our property will drive more people to discover the property. It also encourages people to remain engaged in between releases of products, ensuring that they will purchase them when they come out and not lose interest.
2: This fosters a positive relationship between the fans and the author/company. By giving some fan fiction creators a platform and supporting their work, it will make them be more supportive of our overall brand. Those fanfic authors themselves will go on to say good things about the brand, which encourages further financial support of our products.
3: Much of this fanfiction could be good, and can be used to inspire future elements of the mainline products where applicable. Many fanfic authors are quite capable, and devote a lot of creative energy to the franchise. With so many people, at least some are likely to discover and come to ideas that are new and worthwhile.
Opposition
Framing: Supporting fanfiction in any respect encourages a significant amount of it to be made, far more than would be produced otherwise.
1: This devalues the brand. Fanfiction is not subject to the same quality control, or public relations care that other products which are made for money are. In particular, some fanfiction is likely to be deliberately brand unsafe, as a ploy to try and drive attention to the fanfiction author. As a result, the brand as a whole becomes associated with these fanfictions, and the community around them. Now, companies will be less willing to associate with the brand, and be promoted at our events. This earns the owners of this copyright less money off the brand as a whole.
2: This could cause burn out among fans. Fanfiction is distinctly disposable when compared to more well constructed releases within the cannon of the franchise. When the most avid and dedicated fans consume a lot of fanfiction very quickly, they get bored of the characters and franchise as a whole. This leads them to direct their attention elsewhere, and you lose out on whatever anticipation existed in advance of future releases for your products.
This house Prefers a World where children are raised communally.
Government
Framing:
1: This gives children with neglectful and bad parents options they otherwise wouldn’t have. For these children, having the choice to spend time with people who might care more about you than your biological parents is very good. It also exposes other people to the dynamics those children have with their parents, which makes people more accountable for how they treat their kid.
2: This allows children more optionality with where to receive guidance. Many children may have identities, hobbies, or values that are different from their biological parents. For these kids, there may be particular things that their biological parents are unable to provide them, even if they are very good. Having this choice can be critical for children in this situation, as it could provide them with guidance that helps them actualize their own personal desires.
3: This helps parents with the burden of child rearing, which is often substantial. Particularly for working class families, raising children requires a lot of physical, emotional, and financial resources that not everyone can provide to a high quality. Being able to lean on your neighbors and members of your community would allow parents to spend more time on themselves, and make the time they spend with their child more meaningful.
Opposition
Framing: Parents have stronger obligations to their children in our world, as it is unclear who in particular has obligations to help kids in a world where anyone could hypothetically help them
1: This creates a vacuum of support for some children, who fall through the cracks. Without biological obligations, many parents of children will not do work and pay attention to their children that they might otherwise do. As a result, many of the obligations that are inherent in childcare do not get met for some kids, who wind up without any caretakers at all.
2: There will be some children that get significantly more attention than others. Unfortunately, some children are more difficult to raise than others. They may have bad mental health which makes them more difficult to discipline or care for. For these children, members of the community will not want to provide them as much love and attention as other kids, creating an unequal field of support for all kids. In our world, children are all loved absolutely by their own parents, but this is no longer the case in the world of side government.
This house Would require all news programs and social media feeds to devote a certain percentage of content to “feel good” stories.
Government
1: This is a check and balance against a general trend of negativity and pessimism in the media. Media companies drive more engagement from negative stories than from positive ones, which means that they will frame stories in the worst light possible. By forcing them to include some content that is optimistic, it will help ensure that people see the good in the world when otherwise media companies would not have a strong incentive to show this.
2: This is particularly useful for some media outlets, who feed off of negative content. Many media outlets have private agendas, or engage in hate speech. For these media outlets, the harmful outcomes of their conduct can be mitigated by requiring some content that does not promote anger.
Opposition
1: This is unnecessary, as the media already have sufficient incentives to be positive. Media companies and social media companies do not want users to be upset when engaging with their brand. Reporters also enjoy making content, and some of that will be positive no matter what, since the story is inherently one that is positive. Companies are better placed to determine the character and quantity of their content than the government would be.
2: This is harmful in rare instances when it is inappropriate to have good content. Sometimes, during the fallout of tragic events there can be periods of great mourning for a society. In these cases, it is awful to impose feel good content onto people where they would be feeling very badly.
This house Would implement Umuganda in Canada
Government
1: This creates a significant source of labor for a lot of work that often gets neglected in municipalities. Municipalities are poor, and often insufficiently handle things like repairs, garbage, and social welfare. Charity is not enough to bridge this gap, or does not do so as well as it would otherwise. This labor would make a lot of simple common sense improvements to peoples communities that otherwise would not happen.
2: This is good for promoting broad social cohesion among a diverse community of people. Many people do not have significant friendships within their communities, although they would if they were forced to get out and spend time amongst them. This creates a greater sense of community cohesion, and friendship. This could also help break down social echo chambers that cause people to hate one another due to an unrealistic and false perception they build of them from social media.
Opposition
1: This is an unreasonable excess of state power and control over the populus. People already submit total authority in many things to the state, and this is often something that does not clearly benefit them. Given people already pay so much of their agency and finances to an oppressive state, it is unreasonable for them to also ask for people’s time and labor in addition to this.
2: For some people, this could be a uniquely unreasonable ask. Some people from unique circumstances may have particular mental, physical, or social disabilities that make participation in Umuganda uniquely challenging. People could also have unique circumstances that make the timing of Umuganda a bad fit for their personal schedule. It is an unreasonable ask for these demands to be so inflexible.
This house believes that the US should abandon its strategy of promoting democracy in foreign countries
Government
1: This causes a lot of unnecessary global conflict between the US and major regional powers like China, Russia, and Iran. The US trying to impose values onto countries who otherwise might not wind up valuing or caring about them causes regional actors to become scared that the US is going to impose its values onto them or their regional allies. As a result, they wind up making aggressive actions within their own region to counteract the US, causing a self fulfilling prophecy of conflict.
2: This would improve the stability of ground conditions in many states who wind up being sanctioned by the US and their allies for refusing to accept democratic values. When the US sanctions states like Cuba or Venezuela, it is the poor people in these countries who face most of the repercussions. This is unacceptable, and neither US interests nor democratic values are more important than the wellbeing of real people.
Opposition
Framing:
1: The US is the best global actor to promote liberalization within the world. Liberalization is tremendously good, as it secures people with baseline human rights. In particular, liberal values have been good for the liberation of women and other marginalized groups. Given no other actor in the world is capable of inducing liberalization, it is good for the US to promote liberal values within the world as a whole.
2: The US is necessary in order to counteract the promotion of anti-democratic values by bad actors within the world. Whether that is states like Russia and China, or autocratic governments like those in Myanmar and Syria, there are groups who wish to empower and maintain autocratic governments. If there is no exporting of liberal democratic values, they will eventually lose out to anti-liberal ideologies.
This house, as the vegetarian community, Would primarily advocate for a vegetarian diet by highlighting the health outcomes as opposed to the moral harm to animals
Government
Framing:
1: People are inherently selfish, and are likely to personally prioritize arguments for vegetarianism that benefit their own selves. By showing that meat heavy diets are unhealthy, people will be convinced to eat less meat in order to protect themselves. Even if they do not eliminate meat, that is still a reduction in harm.
2: Arguments that vegetarianism hurts animals indicate that meat eaters have been evil for most of their life, which they will feel unwilling to personally accept. People do not want to be bad, and generally create a justification for their actions. Many meat eaters have already done so for animals, and will not change their views just because someone tells them that animal welfare matters.
Opposition
1: Arguments that highlight the moral harms to animals are very effective. Many people either do not know the extent of factory farming, or are willfully blind to it. By highlighting this, we can force some people into accepting they are complicit in horrific conditions imposed upon animals. Some people will come to realize this is true, and will not only change their consumption habits, but even assist in vegetarian advocacy.
2: Arguments that disregard the moral harms to animals are difficult to translate to other important elements of animal rights advocacy, and may actively undercut them. If we do not push that animals are morally important, then we will have trouble arguing against harmful testing conditions for animals in many industries, and other industries that harm animals.
This house Would allow patients to consent to untested medication or procedures
Government
Model
1: It is principally justified for people to consent to taking untested medication. The state already allows patients to opt out of treatments due to individual preference (for example, refusing chemotherapy), even when opting out will likely lead to harmful health outcomes. Individuals will almost always make the best decision for themselves because they have the greatest understanding of their own pain and needs.
2: Doctors will make good decisions about which drugs are offered and the way they are prescribed. First, doctors value their moral obligation and responsibly offer drugs which they believe in. Second, doctors can adapt the drugs to patient responses by lowering dosages or pairing them with other drugs. This is likely to be sufficient, given that many drugs were barred by funding to complete their testing, and the broad functions of the drug probably work.
3: When untested drugs show signs of success, it paves way for larger quantities of research and development. This motion thus allows funding for R&D to become more efficiently distributed, prioritizing drugs that will likely work. To scale this mechanism, I’d note how invaluable human testing is to drugs – as it features the most reliable data and is also often the most expensive to gather.
Opposition
1: The uncertainty of untested medication means that both doctors and patients are unable to make informed decisions regarding its usage. Even if the chances are low, patients may end up in situations much more painful than the alternatives, which they are unable to consent to. Weaker alternatives are fine because they likely outweigh the immense suffering posed by bad side effects.
2: The state has an obligation to prevent citizens from making decisions that have the potential to harm them, especially when citizens have irrational decision-making metrics. Patients lack information when consenting into untested medication, since the proximity of pain from their current disease is larger in comparison to the potential of future unknown side effects. This means that patients will overwhelmingly opt into regrettable medications, at the expense of their own health.
3: Corporations have perverse incentives which encourage them to heavily push for the prescription of consumer medication with false promises. This could happen through direct advertising or pressure for institutions to use their drugs. Even if many of those medications fail, their label as “untested” absolves the corporation from responsibility in the public eye, preventing them from taking accountability for potentially harmful medications.
This house Supports the use of small target campaigns in elections against unpopular incumbents
Government
Framing:
-Incumbents have a significant advantage, just because they are unpopular now does not mean that they are guaranteed to lose.
-Incumbent are probably bad, hence why they are generally unpopular. Reasonable to assume that a change in governance would be a good thing.
1: This is the best way to effectively remove the incumbent from power. Giving some tenable platform allows for the incumbent government to also focus on an aggressive platform, attacking what we have proposed. By keeping the focus of the campaign upon the party in power, we can best highlight the problems that their government has had.
2: This is an effective way to ensure that the winning party will secure enough power to govern effectively. Many political systems are multi-party, and governments need a majority to effectively rule. By focusing our campaign on why the incumbent is bad, we can best secure widespread support and not wind up hemorrhaging voters to the right and left who may go on to support parties more ideologically preferable to them. As a result, a functional government gets elected that can fix the mistakes of the incumbent.
Opposition
Framing: It is likely that the incumbent will lose power either way, and therefore the important question is how good the party who comes in to replace them are.
1: Without a clear policy proposal, it is unclear voters are meaningfully exercising their democratic will. People have a principled right to have some control in their government, and this system is not being properly implemented if parties do not propose something meaningful.
2: This would make it hard to hold whatever party wins the election accountable, since it is unclear what they intend to do if they are in power.
This house Prefers a world without borders
Government
Framing
1: Borders worsen the lottery of birth by restricting the free movement of people. They confine people to a nation state that they were never able to consent into, and make it artificially more difficult for them to leave.
2: A world without borders would significantly increase the free movement of people. This would greatly increase the amount of cultural exchange and knowledge sharing, leading to faster innovation and more cultural tolerance worldwide.
3: There will be fairer economic activity since everyone has access to the same resources.
4: It will be harder for conflict to arise for two reasons: 1) War becomes expensive. 2) War becomes undesirable given that cooperation generally leads to a greater output.
Opposition
Framing
1: It is principally necessary for people to have the ability to identify themselves as an entity or community. To force people to reconcile with people who have different beliefs is unfair since: 1) it could cause great practical harm to one; 2) sometimes your principles will clash on things that are extremely important to you.
2: Minority communities have much less capacity for self-emancipation when they have nowhere else to go to. There will always be people who are considered minorities within a “nation,” and nations will be located far enough such that the “otherment” of certain groups of people is likely to occur. Since governing entities are likely to prioritize selfish needs, some oppression is likely to occur.
3: The likely way this motion would occur is through absolute global domination, since no nation wants to cede their territory. There have been many attempts at conquering the world: Rome, Persia, China, Mongolia, Germany, Soviet Union, some of which were quite close to a different outcome.
This house believes that the US should advocate for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine
Government
Framing:
1: This is a definitive end to a conflict that Ukraine is unlikely to win, saving additional months or years of fighting for no meaningful purpose. Given that there is unlikely to be any future gains by either side, it is unreasonable to continue fighting now for no clear purpose. War is very bad, and any expedited end to the conflict would be tremendous for human welfare in the region.
2: This would improve the relationship between the West and Russia, which has become very bad following the beginning of the Ukraine war. By acting as a peacemaker, the US would reframe their relationship with Russia from one as an enemy, to something a little bit better. There are still likely to be some tensions between them, but things could be a little bit better.
Opposition
Framing:
1: It is still possible that Ukraine could win the war and reclaim the territory that Russia has conquered, to neglect this while Ukraine is still motivated to continue trying to win would be wrong. Ukraine cannot continue fighting without the US providing support, and the US supporting a ceasefire would be horrible for morale.
2: This would make the US appear weak, and future security guarantees in places like Taiwan would be less meaningful. Setting a precedent that the US is an absolute ally is an effective deterrent to conflict elsewhere in the world.
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