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

I negate the resolution. Resolve: Placing political conditions on humanitarian aid to foreign countries is unjust. Definitions: Political condition: Conditionality of or belonging to formal administration. Conditionality: Something being true or happening if something else is true or happens. Humanitarian aid: Assisting action that saves lives or alleviates suffering. Justice: Giving each their due. Giving each their "due" implies a sense of obligation, and all obligations are essentially moral. Thus, my value is morality. Morality: A guide to action. My metaethic is resolvability. To resolve any moral dispute between opposing sides, one cannot use a subjective system. Since a subjective system can consider either side of the dispute under its bias, subjective systems are extremely inconsistent. Thus, subjective systems cannot be used to resolve moral disputes. Only an objective system can resolve a moral dispute with any consistency. So, to resolve moral disputes an objective system that weighs all inputs according to their equal value must be used. This system is utilitarianism. Mill writes: "The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so the other sources of our experiment. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require that happiness is a good: that each person"s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons." Thus, my value criterion is creating the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Observation One: The power of a country to place political conditions on humanitarian aid is not a power that is necessarily used in all cases; it is a tool in the toolbox. For example, the president of the United States can veto a bill from congress, but he does not have to every time, it is just a tool in his toolbox. Likewise, countries do not have to place political conditions on all humanitarian aid to foreign countries to place political conditions at all. Thus, the burden is on my opponent to prove that in all cases, political conditionality on humanitarian aid to foreign countries is unjust. Contention One: Political conditions reduce poverty. Boone writes: "Critics of foreign aid programs have long argued that poverty reflects government failure. In this paper I test predictions for aid effectiveness based on an analytical framework that relates aid effectiveness to political regimes. I find that aid does not significantly increase investment, nor benefit the poor as measured by improvements in human development indicators, but it does increase the size of government. The impact of aid does not vary according to whether recipient governments are liberal democratic or highly repressive. But liberal political regimes and democracies, ceteris paribus, have on average 30% lower infant mortality than the least free regimes. This may be due to greater empowerment of the poor under liberal regimes even though the political elite continues to receive the benefits of aid programs. An implication is that short-term aid targeted to support new liberal regimes may be a more successful means of reducing poverty than current programs." Given that countries with more liberal regimes tend to receive humanitarian aid more positively than countries without, and that there is less poverty in those countries as a result of those liberal regimes, requesting a country adopt a specific governmental policy for their own good is not only not morally unjust, it is a moral obligation. Allowing the elite of countries with poor governments to eat up humanitarian aid is a violation of the value criterion. Contention Two: Political conditions allow a more functional government. Svensson writes: "Why has the macroeconomic impact of foreign aid seemingly been so poor? Is there a relationship between the widespread level of corruption and other types of rent-seeking activities and concessional assistance? To answer these questions we provide a simple game-theoretic rent-seeking model. The model has a number of implications. First, under certain circumstances, an increase in government revenue lowers the provision of public goods. Second, the mere expectation of aid may suffice to increase rent dissipation and reduce productive public spending. This result may be reversed, however, if the donor community can enter into a binding policy commitment. We also provide some preliminary empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis that foreign aid and windfalls are on average associated with higher corruption in countries more likely to suffer from competing social groups. We find no evidence that the donors systematically allocate aid to countries with less corruption." Because donor countries that enter in policy agreements with the recipient country tend to increase productive government spending, the benefits of political conditionality on humanitarian aid are inherently obvious. Once again we see that political conditionality leads to morally beneficial consequences for the recipient country which once again is indicative of moral obligation to conditionality, not moral prohibition, and thus I negate. On to my opponent's case. First, my opponent's value criterion is vague. "Dignity" is a key term here which my opponent has provided no definition for. Until my opponent does provide a definition, we should use my value criterion as not only is it well defined, but I have a warrant for it as well. Now, for the main tagline of my opponent's first contention, "Political conditions placed on humanitarian aid are often ineffective, making them unjust". What my opponent has done here is set up a false dichotomy. Actions are not simply morally obligated or prohibited. Moral actions can be also be permissible, which is a neutral state. Only an action which is morally prohibited is considered unjust, so claiming that aid is often ineffective proves nothing with regard to being unjust. Because aid is "often" ineffective, then there are still some moral consequences which make those circumstances morally obligated for political conditionality. But even if my opponent could prove that there were never any positive consequences of political conditionality, then it would still remain in the realm of permissibility, not prohibition. My opponent, then, must prove that the negative effects of political conditionality ALWAYS (see observation one) outweigh the benefits. Subpoints A and B follow similarly. Saying that "many" countries follow a specific action is not the same as saying that all do, and most certainly not the same as saying that this causes a negative effect that always outweighs any positive effect. My opponent's contention two falls due to the following. The first warrant lists only one example, which, again, does not necessarily apply to all cases or outweigh all cases. The second warrant warns of a risk, not a certainty. Again, tool in the toolbox deals with this. The third warrant states that developing countries might develop their own resources and no longer need to purchase aid from the donor country. Because developed countries are more economically stable, this will benefit the developing country far more than it will harm the donor country. The third contention is effectively dealt with by my Boone and Svensson cards, which both state that there is solid evidence to be seen that political conditionality actually increases the productive use of humanitarian aid. Over to you, Aff.