Resolved: Individuals have a moral obligation to assist people in need.

First of all, let me welcome my opponent to the site, and thank her for the oppertunity to do this debate (recently I had to cancel a debate on this topic because my opponent's computer died). It's also good to be up against a debater with more experience in face-to-face debating - I swear that actually changes the whole dynamic of the debate. I've never done LD before (we use Australs style) but I'm happy to follow con's proposed format. To prevent me having an extra round, I will post no new rebuttal or constructive material in the last round. Sweet, now let's get on to the debate. Notice to plagiarism freaks: I am heavily plagiarising my argument from the last debate which was never completed, so please don't penalise me. People can be "in need" for all manner of things. Right now I am in need of a better computer, a working TV, money and a large list of additional stuff. I'm not going to argue that you, or anyone else, should have a "moral obligation" to provide all these things for me. Therefore, I'm going to limit the standard of what qualifies as a person being "in need. " Are you a civilian about to be killed for the personal pleasure of some tyrant? Congratulations, you qualify as being "in need. " Are you being held as a sex slave? Well done, you're in need too. Have you been arbitrarily detained? Good, you also qualify. Do you long for a nice long vacation? So do I, but that is beyond the scope of this debate. Therefore, I will define "in need" as being people who have been denied commonly accepted human rights. Why human rights? I believe in equality of opportunity - which is another way of saying, helping everyone who has less opportunity than you get as much as you have. I know I limited the scope of this debate to human rights, but if you don't have human rights, you can't have equal opportunity. Indeed, equality of opportunity can only be achieved with full equality under the law, which cannot be achieved when you afford certain groups "special" rights. If you do want a vacation or a new TV, a good place to start would be to fight for equality under the law, which will give you and everybody else a fair chance to earn one. Therefore, by helping human rights, we help people in need everywhere. Human rights are pretty cool. That's fairly self-evident - all people are more or less equal, so we need to treat them more or less equally. That's called the principle of reciprocity, and it exists in almost every moral framework on this planet. Why? Because you can't have rights without justice, and you can't have justice without reciprocity - treating people differently based on their beliefs, for instance, would clearly be unjust. You cannot establish a right for a people without entitling those people to the right. Rights cannot be applied to one belief, or one race (et cetera), because the characteristic cannot be justifiably linked to the right, so all rights must be either contingent upon circumstance, or universal, and must be afforded to all those for whom the right is established. That implies that universal rights exist - our human commonality of circumstance demands that there must be some basic entitlements for all people. As Kofi Annan put it: “Human rights are what reason requires and conscience demands. They are us and we are them. Human rights are rights that any person has as a human being. We are all human beings; we are all deserving of human rights. One cannot be true without the other. ”Having established that all people are entitled to basic rights, we have also established that objective morality exists. Human rights are fundamentally moral rights (also known as natural law), because they are not specific to a jurisdiction - they derive not from some government signing a piece of paper, but from our common and universal condition. In addition, they are objective, because they apply in exactly the same way to everyone. There is no contingency. So if there are objective, moral and universal rights out there, we are morally obliged to defend them. This can be shown by exclusion of the alternative - if we had no duty to defend the rights of others, other's rights would not be defended, and thus they would not be entitled to the right, breaking the premise that they are rights. Enforcing universal human rights helps the victims of human rights abuse - the ones "in need". We are the individuals. We hold this obligation as self-evidently as we hold human rights. Doing nothing is doing something. If you stand idle while watching somebody torture some civilians, you are party to that torture, and you are culpable. We cannot allow human rights violations to continue in the world. Denying a moral duty to assist people in need of assistance for human rights violations is both a denial of all rights and a denial of all justice. Rights and justice are pretty cool too, but I doubt my opponent will deny them. I hope that makes my argument reasonably clear. The motion stands.