Debating on Ethics. Hints, recommendations and evaluation of debating applied ethical issues

The purpose of this script is to give recommendations, hints and tips for debating applied ethical issues, a highly interesting field in debating. It gives an introduction into ethics and the main theoretical approaches concerning moral philosophy. Beginning from the preparation and organization of a debate to the actual debating and performance of team and individual speakers the procedure and functions of debates are examined. Specific interest is given to rebuttals, points of interests as well as (logical) fallacies of argumentation that may occur during a speech and requires qualities in language and rhetorical skills in general. Individual speaker performance is considered by matter (content), method (strategy) and manner (style). For these areas of debating the paper gives recommendations and provides useful phrases to the student.

Ethics also plays part in all exchanges of opinions, The ethics of debate gives further insight into rules how to behave in a debate and how fruitful debating should be.

The second part considers the evaluation of debates. Usually the performance of teams are assessed and one team may provide better arguments and pursue a better strategy than the other party. General recommendations for adjudicators shall alleviate the process of judgment during the debating process as well as afterwards when the performance of parties is reviewed. The script proposes a possible evaluation scheme and a marking system that considers the individual performance but also recognizes the team strategy when debating applied ethical issues.

Finally a concluding section will summarize the main topics of the script by providing some examples of applied ethical issues.