OK, mission completed, thanks for the input.
My teammates and I were overprepared for this debate. Two of my teammates are extraordinarily well-organized and intelligent. Because of them, we did research, exchanged notes, and had a bit of a rehearsal. The other side did none of that, which was evident in their performance.
I'm kind of on the fence as to whether the military needs a joint canon of ethics; on the one hand I think it would be useful, but on the other I think there are other, more fundamental things that should be addressed first. Nonetheless, the mission was to support the "pro" side of the argument, so that's what we did.
One of our main points was that it is precisely because of sundry, overlapping, and perhaps even contradictory rules, regulations, codes, laws, etc. that are out there, that the Armed Services (Army, Navy, Air Force. Marines, Coast Guard) needs one joint canon of military ethics. The joint ethics reg in and of itself is 185 pages. I'm pretty sure we can come up with something better than that.
The service-specific codes are useful, but they project service-specific values, not ethics. In our definition, values are building blocks for ethics; they are therefore mutually exclusive. Moreover, things like the UCMJ, Code of Conduct, and Geneva Conventions are laws, not ethics. As it is impossible to legislate every possible situation, a canon of ethics would be much more useful to Joe in any situation in which he finds himself.
There were some other points as well, those are the ones I remember the most. We briefed first so the other side was largely left trying to rebut our points. Since they didn't prepare very well, it was a bit of a struggle for them. They are smart people, but a little prep would have served them well. The way the debate was set up, it was 5 minutes of speaking each, pro/con, four people per side, so it was over in about 45 minutes. The other side held it together pretty well until the end; their "closer" made a semi-coherent ramble that contradicted the position made by his side's first speaker. He also went on about how we don't need ethics "because we kill people" and made some kind of analogy I didn't understand about why Rommel (which he pronounced "Ro-mel"
) wasn't but on trial for war crimes after the war. He went last so I didn't get a chance to point out the a) Rommel was dead before the end of the war and b) you can be a belligerent on the opposite side and NOT be tried for war crimes if you behave legally and ethically.
We didn't assign winners and losers in this debate but I'm pretty sure we won ;)
Another set of students had to debate whether it's ethical for a flag officer to resign in protest. Personally I think that was a much more interesting topic.
