Utilitarianism
Claim: the right action produces the greatest total well-being. Value: morality or societal welfare. Criterion: maximizing expected well-being, or minimizing suffering. Works on: policy-flavored resolutions with measurable consequences. Standard objections: it permits sacrificing individuals for aggregate gain; consequences are hard to predict; it counts unjust preferences. Answer the objections with: rule utilitarianism (evaluate rules, not acts) and the point that every framework must predict consequences somewhere. Read: Mill, Utilitarianism, chapters 2 and 5.
Kantian deontology
Claim: act only on principles you could will as universal law; treat persons as ends, never merely as means. Value: morality or human dignity. Criterion: respecting rational agency, or consistency with the categorical imperative. Works on: resolutions about rights, consent, and treatment of persons. Standard objections: rigid in conflicts between duties; says little about outcomes; the universalization test can be gamed by describing the maxim narrowly. Read: Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, section 2; the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Kant's moral philosophy.
Social contract theory
Claim: political obligations come from an agreement, actual or hypothetical, among free people. Value: justice or governmental legitimacy. Criterion: consistency with the consent of the governed (Locke), or protecting the security that makes the contract worthwhile (Hobbes). Works on: any resolution about what governments ought to do. Standard objections: nobody actually consented; hypothetical consent can justify almost anything; Hobbes and Locke reach opposite conclusions from the same starting point, so specify which. Read: Locke, Second Treatise, chapters 8 and 9; Hobbes, Leviathan, chapters 13 and 17.
Rawlsian justice
Claim: just principles are those people would choose behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing their place in society; inequalities are permitted only if they benefit the least advantaged. Value: justice. Criterion: the difference principle, or protecting the least advantaged. Works on: resolutions about distribution, education, taxation, and opportunity. Standard objections: the veil is a thought experiment, not a fact about people; it privileges risk aversion; libertarian critics (Nozick) argue it ignores how holdings were acquired. Read: Rawls, A Theory of Justice, sections 3, 4, 11, and 24; Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, chapter 7 for the reply.
Virtue ethics
Claim: the right action is what a person of practical wisdom would do; morality is about character, not rules or sums. Value: morality or human flourishing. Criterion: promoting the conditions for flourishing, or acting as the virtuous agent would. Works on: resolutions about education, community, and personal obligation. Standard objections: it does not tell you what to do in a specific case; virtues vary across cultures. Read: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, books 1 and 2.
Structural violence and care ethics
Claim: harms built into institutions (poverty, exclusion, systematic disadvantage) are moral wrongs even without an identifiable perpetrator; moral reasoning should start from relationships and dependency rather than abstract principle. Value: justice or human dignity. Criterion: reducing structural violence, or meeting the needs of the vulnerable. Works on: resolutions where the affirmative or negative can show a pattern of harm to a group. Standard objections: everything becomes structural violence without a limiting principle; care ethics struggles with obligations to strangers. Read: Galtung, "Violence, Peace, and Peace Research," Journal of Peace Research (1969); Held, The Ethics of Care (2006).
How to choose
- Start from your contentions. The framework must make your best arguments matter and your opponent's best arguments matter less.
- Prefer frameworks you can explain to a volunteer judge in two sentences. A perfectly defended framework the judge does not follow loses.
- Prepare the standard objections above for your own framework before the tournament, in writing.
- Read the primary source. Two chapters of Locke beat twenty summaries, and cross-examination exposes the difference.
The civil liberties affirmative and negative in the case archive show Locke and Hobbes in use on the same resolution.
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