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Motions
One a day. Every card shows how the argument split and what happened to the claims — not who said what, and not how many people agreed.
Employers should be required to publish a salary range in every job advert.
The EU's pay transparency directive obliges member states to require pay ranges for advertised roles; Colorado has done so since 2021. Employers argue that a published range becomes a floor to negotiate up from, and compresses what they can offer an unusually strong candidate.
Generated artwork · BauddhikGovernments should be allowed to require that any AI system used in hiring discloses how it ranks candidates.
The EU AI Act classifies hiring algorithms as high-risk and obliges employers to explain them; New York City's Local Law 144 requires an annual bias audit. Vendors argue that a ranking model detailed enough to be explained is also detailed enough to be gamed, and that a disclosure rule therefore trades one unfairness for another.
Voting should be compulsory.
Australia has fined non-voters since 1924 and turns out around 90% of registered voters; most voluntary systems manage far less. The objection is that a vote extracted under penalty is not consent, and that compelled turnout mostly adds uninformed ballots.
Wealthy countries should pay for climate damage in poorer ones even where no specific disaster can be traced to them.
The loss and damage fund agreed at COP27 and operationalised at COP28 rests on cumulative historical emissions rather than attributable harm. Critics say liability without causation has no stopping rule; supporters say waiting for attribution science means paying nobody.
Schools should ban smartphones for the entire school day, not just in class.
France has restricted phones for younger pupils since 2018 and several countries have followed. Attainment evidence is mixed and contested, and the strongest objections are about safeguarding and about whether schools should teach self-regulation rather than remove the choice.
Deliberately infecting healthy volunteers should be a normal part of vaccine development.
The UK ran the first COVID-19 human challenge trial in 2021. Challenge studies can answer in weeks what field trials take years to settle, on far fewer participants — at the cost of knowingly making a healthy person ill in a way ordinary trial ethics forbid.
Online anonymity does more good than harm.
Anonymity protects whistleblowers, abuse survivors and people under hostile governments, and it also removes the main cost of behaving badly. Real-name policies have been tried at national scale — South Korea repealed its own in 2012 — with disputed results.