Tabula rasa is all around the fairest way to judge a debate round.

In this debate, you will see that there is a fundamental difference between the way my opponent and I view debate. Under my opponent's point of view, debate is essentially a game. This means that it's not necessarily about who makes the "best" arguments or about who is most persuasive - the winner is determined only based on who "won" the arguments based on the framework established by the debaters in the round. I would not argue that this is not valuable; there is value inherent to having debate be a strictly competitive activity. However, under this framework I do not feel that we are exploiting debate's true potential. In any athletic event, the actual event that shows how all of the athlete's training paid off is the sporting event itself; and it is great to have events such as the Olympics that showcase the best in human potential. However, what is important to recognize is that these events exist precisely because of what is required to do them; thus, I would argue that the preparation is more important than the event itself. If you spend years training to be the best sprinter in the world, in the end it does not make a whole lot of difference whether you win a medal or not: you have truly improved yourself as a person, and the medal would only be the icing on the cake, but one does not need it to prove what one did to be so successful. In debate, winning is nice; but it is surely not the point of the activity, and the reason it exists. People engage in debates for education; we are all on this site because we want to discuss the things that interest us. If debate were solely about competing, it surely would not exist as an activity. In fact, we must recognize that all competitive activities stem from the fact that people engage in something that betters them as a person, and they want to showcase that. Thus I present my stance on the activity - that debate is about learning. As a result, tabula rasa is in fact not the fairest way to judge; it's not fair to the judge his or herself, and it's not fair to the debaters. The first one might seem unlikely, but consider the fact that anyone who takes the time to read a debate is clearly interested in the subject, and wants the debaters to know that. He or she is imparting his or her wisdom on the situation by deciding which debater was better and more correct. If the judge is not allowed to vote based on his or her own personal experience, then what is the purpose of voting? To simply pick a winner? No one wants to judge a debate if there is no purpose for it; and if one must judge from a tabula rasa perspective, then the judge has no importance in the debate other than to be an "impartial" selector of whoever upheld the rules of the game better. This, as one can see, is a dangerous way to view debate; inevitably the activity would fail if it were simply to pick the better competitor, as it would have nothing that distinguishes it from anything else. People engage in debate because of their love for learning combined with their willingness to compete. As a result, I advocate that a better point of view is to not judge "impartially" and without opinions on the debate. Now, this does not mean that if one debater is a neo-Nazi, the judge should vote them down because of it; personal relations and opinions should have no real bearing on the debate. However, what needs to be relevant is the judge's own knowledge. If one debater says that World War II started in 1914, you as the judge should not let the debater get away with it, even if the other debater does not argue this point. This is simply incorrect, and if you as the judge vote on an argument that is simply incorrect, you are fostering more mis-education and laziness in debate, which can only help to destroy it. In order to make this activity more useful for the people that engage in it, people need to be corrected. One might lose the debate for making the incorrect argument, but is that so important? What's more important is that the person's fundamental misconception has been corrected and so they are no longer holding an incorrect point of view; you have just educated that person invaluably, and that is much more important than any single debate. Also, my opponent essentially hits the nail on the head, unintentionally, for why being tab is impossible. He says that judges should come in with a "moderate sense of logic." Thus, he cannot avoid the slippery slope that comes with this - exactly how much should a judge bring into a round? Either it is absolutely nothing, and the judge comes in with absolutely no preconceptions, or you find yourself arguing the level to which the judge should come in with knowledge, as opposed to whether the judge should come in with knowledge at all. Once my opponent concedes that the judge should bring some of his/her own ideas into the round, then he has lost his original point that the judge has to vote simply on "what is there." So, I would argue that the framework for judging debate should be based on education, and not based on debate being simply a game or competitive activity. If you agree with me on this issue, then it is simply unfair to everyone involved to vote on an incorrect argument, because you are no longer educating the debaters, and are in fact encouraging learning wrongly.