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
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Proposition
Framing: To be an organ donor, you must die in a hospital with your body supported by a ventilator. With a ventilator, oxygen is circulated in the blood so organs can be used for transplant. For this reason, less than two per cent of all hospital deaths are suitable potential donors.
1: A significantly greater quantity of body donations will save countless lives through transplants of donated organs. Keeping them alive and their families happier are both utile things.
2: In the status quo, everyone potentially benefits from organ donations, since a limited availability of organ donations is available to everyone. Everyone is thus principally obligated to contribute to this system, as opposed to scapegoating this responsibility to some stronger-willed members of society. This is not synonymous to forcing everyone to donate to charity, since body donations come at an equivalent expense to everyone.
3: An increase in body donations will suppress costs and increase accessibility in anything surrounding working with these bodies. Not only does this mitigate costs on organs for hospitals, it would also make cadavers a commonplace tool for research within medical facilities, training more and better doctors.
Opposition
Countermodel: Implement a system that will also drastically increase body donations. For example, make everyone a body donor by default, and allow people to opt out if they choose to. And/or, educate people about the large benefits of body donation.
1: For some people, the dismemberment of their body will directly cut-short their ascent into the afterlife, and infringe on all their fundamental beliefs of the circle of life. There were no means for these people to opt out of religious beliefs, so a social contract that ostracizes them would be unjust given their beliefs are mostly a social consequence. Note: these harms are incurred while the person is still living, because their knowledge of what will happen to them after death is limited to their beliefs.
2: Those who are most opposed to this motion will visit drastic lengths to avoid their body being donated. At the lighter end, protests and heavy lawsuits will strain government resources. A reasonably uncontroversial idea of body donations being good also likely becomes dramatized by politicians and the media. At the most extreme end, those avoiding body donations might avoid hospitals entirely, opting to avoid medical treatment and perhaps dying prematurely so that they may pass away in peace. This creates equally innocent practical harms that might outweigh the innocent lives saved on prop.
3: When mandates which infringe on bodily autonomy and bypass the consent of individuals may be passed, it creates a relevant precedent for future legal considerations. This is a slippery slope on other issues concerning bodily autonomy, such as reproductive rights, end-of-life decisions, and collection of genetic data/surveillance. While this motion probably won’t directly cause other harmful blanket policies to come, it will create room for the legal system to defend bad things in individual cases.
Proposition
1: Land is a public good and should belong to everyone. Income is not. A land tax creates mechanisms for collective compensation from land ownership. Land is also an important factor of production, so the people who get taxed are generally going to be quite rich. This frees up more money for the working class.
2: Property is an attractive buy-and-hold investment in the status quo because its value consistently outpaces the growth of wages. This is true due to NIMBY opposition to new housing construction, policies that benefit home investors (1031 exchanges, negative gearing, opportunity zones etc.), and liberalized mortgage markets that make it way cheaper to borrow money to buy a home. This motion directly increases wages and drastically increases incentives to develop the land which is owned, creating more affordable housing. The reason this doesn’t all just balance out is because developing land makes the land more valuable in the context of a city, thus a feedback loop that increases incentives to develop.
3: By reducing investment into property holding, the massive market likely shifts into business investments or government bonds. This is good because money then gets spent either improving businesses (and thus raising wages) or developing important public infrastructure.
Opposition
1: Land taxes are not progressive, which means poorer individuals will systematically be locked out of land ownership. Income taxes could theoretically substantially reduce the wealth gap. Land is also declining in importance as a factor of production.
2: Wealthy people who need to own land don’t want to get taxed, so they’d prefer to develop on cheaper land. This leads to capital flight in emerging cities, as wealthy owners prefer to bail out from increasing land prices. This means economic centers are constantly maneuvering through different emerging cities, leaving a trail of ‘slumification’ and run-down businesses behind.
3: The government cannot properly budget for the national economy with a land tax because land values are much more volatile than gross income. Wages tend to be quite sticky due to contracts, minimum wage laws, strong pressures from both sides to move wages in either direction, and on a bigger picture, business earnings generally are domestically equalizing. On the other hand, land values could fluctuate heavily depending on which areas are receiving the most development and where businesses are interested in moving, globally. Additionally, workers want to keep incomes as high as possible, meaning naturally high taxes, whereas businesses now want to keep land values as low as possible, meaning naturally low taxes.
Proposition
Framing: While juvenile detention already offers certain correctional facilities, the abolition of juvenile detention is likely to result in a system even more centered around correctional aspects, which also doesn’t lock up youth. World building:
1: It’s the responsibility of social institutions and adults to guide the paths of children because children never had a chance to consent to the vast majority of their circumstances. They are forced into school, cannot choose friendlier households, can’t vote, and lack any control over their socioeconomic status. Even if youth crimes were premeditated, it is a failure of society that they; locking up children and stripping them of their dignity cannot be principally justified.
2: Rehabilitation and support programs offer much better solutions to the youth, as they correct for the otherwise inevitable socioeconomic status and internal beliefs these people have. Juvenile detention is a classist system that stigmatizes and divides the youth into the belief that they must continue down their dark path, that their life has been wasted and there are no options for self-improvement. This increases risk of recidivism and makes captives worse off than they were before. This might also be cheaper in the long run if less people are introduced to juvie systems.
3: Detention centers are one-size-fits-all in nature, which subjugates both non-violent and violent offenders to the same settings. This de-nuancing of offenders leads to all of them being categorized and stigmatized as the worst possible offender. This is because most people barely interact with juvenile detention, and their only interactions are when the most dramatized things occur – which tend to be cases involving the worst offenders.
Opposition
Framing:
1: While children indeed lack the agency which adults might have, this shouldn’t make them immune to the legal system. Serious crimes like assault and murder are clear values within the social contract even to the most misguided youth, so breaching them justifies punishment.
2: Violent offenders pose threats to public safety, regardless of age. They devalue human life and ignore the consent of others, and however innocent prop might have you believe they are, their freedom is outweighed by the freedom of all the innocent people they might harm. When someone does enough to warrant the loss of trust from society, it is necessary to protect their potential victims at all costs. Additionally, victims who believe they’ve encountered the ultimate evil are unequivocally harmed when society tells them they must blame themselves for their emotions of anger and retribution, and rushes to protect and “change” the darkest offenders in the world.
3: Interacting with the outside world without having served any real punishment is bad for offenders. It makes them the punching bags of stigma (especially since prop must keep an eye on them, and it’s easy to recognize someone coming from the offenders’ dorm/school), and fails to educate offenders about the magnitude of their crime. Beliefs can be communicated through schooling or therapy, but they can only be internalized through experiences which carve them into one’s identity. Serving time in a detention center accomplishes this: offenders are given the opportunity to collectively reflect on the actions which brought them here, and what they will do upon their eventual return to normalcy.
Proposition
Framing:
1: Children who grow up playing games where one’s gender identity is firmly attached to the character role harm their perception of gender roles within society. This is because for many children, video games are the primary form of media interaction they have growing up. Violent female playable characters have stories and dialogue which subverts mainstream conceptions of gender roles, and players grow up to love characters like Clementine from The Walking Dead or Abby from The Last of Us.
2: Having less female characters in violent games often means these characters are subject to significant quantities of sexualization and stereotyping. This is because game developers will almost always tunnel vision a conventionally attractive tropey personality woman in order to fulfill all their categorical visions within a single character. More female characters offers much more room to nuance characters, offering a better representation for impressionable players and better gameplay from reality.
3: There’s a broadening audience to video games, and this motion is conducive to retaining a lot of the new players as the game designers and developers show solidarity with them through the newest updates. This is a positive feedback loop, where the gaming community continues to become less insular to a mostly-male echo chamber, and developers are driven to prioritize profits coming from a much less tone deaf world of gamers.
Opposition
1: There are a few miracle examples, but developers have historically done an awful job at portraying women in violent video games. This is because the developers most passionate about violent games, especially the game designers at the very top, were/are members of an echo chamber of sexism. It’s because the video game industry is led by these people that video game spaces liberalize significantly slower than anywhere else in the world. Any amount of playable characters will be written poorly, where punchlines are full of sexism, and they play into the gender role that the developers envisioned. When children grow up playing these games, these then become the same jokes they reiterate to their friends at school, and in the future the rest of society. Less screen time is better.
2: The ‘violent women’ portrayal is responsible for reducing female characters’ personalities into solely violence. First, this reinforces negative stereotypes about women being overly aggressive or emotionally irrational. Second, this leads to a worse game experience, as a lot of these stories are just simply unrealistic.
3: These games are selling on violence, not character. This conventionally caters to men, so for the women convinced to play by the new female character, they are still made a minority within the community, and likely face large quantities of toxicity. We’d rather keep these spaces insular, the liberalization can’t be rushed.
The "petro-yuan" refers to a system where the Chinese yuan (RMB) is used as the currency for trading crude oil in the international market. Traditionally, global oil trade has been conducted primarily in US dollars (termed as "petrodollar"). This would mean that instead of paying for oil imports in US dollars, countries could pay in Chinese yuan. Similarly, oil-exporting countries would receive yuan instead of dollars for their oil exports when trading with China or other nations participating in this system. The establishment of petro-yuan involves setting up mechanisms and financial instruments, such as futures contracts for oil priced in yuan, which are traded on Chinese commodity exchanges like the Shanghai International Energy Exchange.
Proposition
1: Dependency on the US dollar is bad for China because it exposes China to dollar volatility and US monetary policy. Increased demand for the Yuan reduces dependency on the USD, alleviating the amount of Chinese exports that need to be priced in USD, reducing the impacts of tightened American monetary policy on global demand, and grants more control to the Chinese central bank.
2: Countries which use the petro-yuan are likely to develop closer economic ties with China, due to harmonized currency and lower transaction costs. Particularly with oil-exporting countries, this is desirable in order to cheaply satisfy Chinese oil needs. More generally, the CCP gets freer trade which makes better use of comparative advantages.
3: The introduction of petro-yuan futures contracts are an example of how demand for yuan denominated financial instruments will grow. An increase in market participants boosts the liquidity of these financial instruments, as higher trade volumes make it easier for participants to enter and exit positions. Additionally, these instruments support better price discovery for the Yuan by involving collective expectations of traders, increasing transparency. While central planning worked for the past stranglehold of control over the country, increasing liquidity and transparency eases the CCP into a stable wealthy future.
Opposition
1: Widespread adoption of the petro-yuan reduces Chinese control over domestic monetary policy, as the Yuan reacts to global market pressures such as changes in oil prices and geopolitical tensions. These fluctuations and lack of control are especially harmful to China, which relies on capital controls to manage its centralized economy. China lacks the maturity in its financial market (which isn’t that liquid or transparent) to handle the large capital flows and currency volatility associated with the petroyuan.
2: A successful petro-yuan will likely trigger economic retaliation, where trade barriers, tariffs, and sanctions are increasingly imposed on China. This is unpreferable for Chinese citizens, whose margins in wealth are washed and lose access to Western goods and commute. The CCP prefers for there not to be trouble stirred up on the bottom, as it undermines their unilateral decision making.
3: Like how the petrodollar replaced the gold standard and led to a strong USD, the petroyuan signals to major Chinese exporters that the CCP intends to strengthen the Yuan. However, Chinese exporters don’t want this because a stronger Yuan reduces their propensity to export. This produces antagonistic relationships between the CCP and these exporters, which is unpreferable for the CCP due to the economic sway these exporters have. For example, capital flight would be unrecoverably damaging for the CCP, on both export losses and job losses in the millions.
There exists a coffee shop whose coffee travels its customers back in time to redo a day-long episode of their life before returning to the present. However, the actions they take during this day will be reverted, and the customer will forever forget about both versions of this day upon returning to the present. Magic prevents customers from having more than one coffee.
Proposition
Framing:
1: For most people, this coffee will be a great experience. It could be an opportunity to overcome regret by saying something to someone without fear of their reaction, or for an amputee to feel agency over their entire body again. People will plan out their experiences with this coffee, with a wealth of knowledge over how others have reacted to it. In the short term, these people will have a great time in the past, and in the present they’d have lost a relatively trivial memory, which is utility neutral.
2: For the few people who visit important memories, they are still more likely to find happiness than not. Those who visit happy memories are clearly prepared to forget about them, since this society probably made it quite clear that they’d forget. These people would be worse off if denied the ability to receive the short term pleasure of this happy memory. For those who seek to forget about dark moments, they’re prepared to face them again and forget about them in the future. Opp might argue that forgetting these memories makes it more difficult to face your trauma, but the important distinction to make is that forgetting does not mean losing knowledge of. And in many circumstances, not having to recall the faces of agony of your family in a fatal car crash will be highly conducive to recovering.
3: Even if not by very much, this franchise would increase the value of an individual’s memories. The ability to revisit a past experience and accurately pick which one to return to benefits from activities of self-reflection, like keeping a diary. Self-reflection is good because it keeps individuals more resilient against mental hurdles and obstacles throughout their life.
Opposition
1: People don’t really think about this coffee franchise until they have a memory they want to return to, like how we don’t really consider our therapy options until we need therapy. This means there is very little consideration about which memories people will return to – they will be brash, short sighted, and make stupidly bad decisions. In the experience of returning the memory this means they will have a bad time facing unexpected consequences due to inadequate planning, and upon returning to the present this means coffee drinkers will forget things they didn’t intend on forgetting.
2: Like psychedelics, this coffee requires a ton of regulation and oversight to make sure it nets good outcomes. This oversight simply cannot derive from a profit motivated franchise, which is likely focused on coercion to maximize the people who drink their coffee. This is a second reason people will carry heavily unrealistic expectations about what the coffee can do, and are likely to be disappointed at least within the memory they return to with their outcomes. This is made worse by the fact that realistic “reviews” of the experience are erased along with the memories.
3: This motion instrumentalizes the people in the past, as everyone else does not know that everything within the next 24 hours will be reversed. Therefore the coffee drinker alone has the capacity to commit any amount of moral harm and inflict suffering on tons of people. Experiences are valuable in the moment, not just retrospectively, so the tree indeed does fall even if no one hears it.
.png)
