The United States has a moral obligation to mitigate international conflicts.

Because the United States has a contractual responsibility to promote peace, I affirm the resolution. The American Heritage dictionary defines mitigation as the act of moderating in force or intensity and an international conflict as a dispute between two or more nations. A moral obligation is an ethical duty imposed by standards of right and wrong. Thus, the resolution can best be summed up as the United States possessing a moral obligation to promote peace and security internationally. Because the resolution asks the affirmative to demonstrate the existence of a moral obligation, the most sensible value for the round is the accurate determination of moral obligations, not only because it provides the most concrete link between the standard and the resolution, but also because it reflects the true nature of the resolution as a declarative statement that is either true or false. The burden of the affirmative is to prove the resolution correct, which requires that we first establish the source of obligations and then demonstrate that the act of mitigation falls under the umbrella of that obligatory foundation. There could be innumerable sources of moral obligations, in the sense that we could potentially derive a moral obligation from a wide range of starting places; however, the resolution specifies that the burden of the affirmative is to prove the existence of a single moral obligation. The thesis of the affirmative, then, will be that the moral obligation to mitigate international conflicts is an obligation derived from the basic ethical requirement to respect contractual agreements made with other parties. Therefore, the sufficient standard to affirm is comprised of two interrelated burdens: The affirmative must demonstrate that a contractual obligation is tantamount to a moral one, and I have to prove that we have a contractual agreement to mitigate international conflicts. Meeting this dual burden of proof would meet the semantic and logical conditions that would make the resolution a true statement, and would thus mandate an affirmative ballot. My first justification establishes that contractual agreements produce moral obligations of compliance. A contract is a voluntary agreement enacted by the will of the agent in question; since autonomy is the basis of contracts, and autonomy is the foundational element of morality, the two are inseparable. Jean-Jacques Rousseau explains that: "To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature: the renounce all liberty is to renounce all morality from his acts. " The reasoning behind this is simple: any system of morality necessarily has at its center a respect for a person's autonomy. Actions and behaviors can only be described as right or wrong insofar as people can be held responsible for the decisions they make; we do not assign moral judgments to rocks or squirrels because they do no have the same level of culpability that humans do. The ability to make choices leads necessarily to the capacity to be held responsible for those choices; to use one's autonomy to enter into an agreement, then, generates corresponding duties to be bound to that contract. Shelly Kagan explains that: "The particular obligations that we find ourselves under, thanks to the specific promises we have made, are often positive duties. Thus, promises can generate positive duties to lend you my car, to meet you after work or what have you. But our intuitions shift if we redescribe this very same requirement in the language of constraints. For now we have a constraint against breaking your promises, and this makes it sound like a negative duty." Making a promise in the form of a contract formalizes responsibilities; the agents within the contract are said to be morally obligated to fulfill the terms of the contract because they voluntarily chose to be bound by those terms. Michael Sandel clarifies: "From the standpoint of autonomy, a contract's moral force derives from the fact of its voluntary agreement; when I enter freely into an agreement, I am bound by its terms, whatever they may be. The fact that they are self-imposed provides one reason at least why I am obligated to fulfill them." We can conclude, then, that contractual obligations have a distinctly moral component. Autonomy means that people are held morally responsible for the decisions that they make; since a contract is a voluntary agreement to do something, the responsibility is generated to meet the conditions of the contract. My second justification proves that the United States is contractually obligated to mitigate international conflicts. First, in 1945 the US Senate ratified the Charter of the United Nations in San Francisco. The Preamble of the UN Charter stipulates that the organization is dedicated to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" and "to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security." The charter further obligates members of affirm "faith in fundamental human rights; in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small." Article One of the First Chapter states: "To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace." The Second Article further requires that "All members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter." Therefore, the UN Charter clearly defines an obligation to mitigate international conflicts and meets the second standard of the criterion. Second, the United States has contractual obligations to its citizens that require mitigation. The Constitution charges the government of the United States to respect and protect the rights of its people as enshrined in the Articles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. International conflict threatens citizens because, as Claudia Grossman explains: As the world is becoming more integrated, the range of factors that influence both national and international peace and security has expanded. Threats to national and international well-being can arise from environmental, social, economic and human rights problems, as well as from traditional military sources. For example, social conflict in one area of the world can interrupt the supply of goods and services to countries across the globe, as well as cause human migrations that overtax the resources of other countries and internationalize local conflicts. We can see then, that because international conflicts negatively affect the citizens of the United States, the government is contractually obligated to mitigate them. The argument of the affirmative, then, can be summarized easily: contractual obligations give rise to moral obligations, and there is a contractual obligation on the part of the United States to mitigate international conflicts. As a result, there is a moral obligation to mitigate international conflicts, and the statement in the resolution is true. As Immanuel Kant concludes: "A good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition…if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing, and there should remain only the good will, then like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself."