Last revised: 10 October 2004
Kant is good on the affirmative because he is a deontological or duty-based philosopher -- he believes we all have moral duties (or "moral obligations"). In particular he is famous for his notion of "universality" -- that a duty isn't moral unless it can be applied universally. He is also famous for the term "categorical imperative" which can basically be summarized as the Golden Rule from the Bible --that a duty isn't moral unless you can switch positions and it still fits. If it would be good for you to help me if I was drowning and good for you if I were to help you when you were drowning, then helping another when drowning is morally good -- it satisfies the categorical imperative.
Kant is particularly relevant to the Nov-Dec 2004 topic because he wrote a famous work, Perpetual Peace, in which he argued that true democratic governments don't wage war on each other.
Kant is thought of as the sort of father of universal principles in social thought -- such as universal human rights principles. Before he came along people just assumed that different rules applied in different cultures and different contexts. But after Kant the notion that some principles were so important that they could rise above different cultures and societies, and could be universally applied to all situations, became accepted. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was one of the first truly global applications of the principle in the field of international law.
On the negative you probably want to use a "consequences" type approach to philosophy -- philosophers who look at the consequences or results of an act, not the duty or obligation. The utilitarians are the most famous example of this school of thought. Kant would say you have a duty to try to save a drowning person whether or not you can actually save him or her in the end. A utilitarian, by contrast, would say, you have a duty to save a drowning person only if you can be successful, and only if the resources you spent saving that person couldn't have been better spent somewhere else. If I have a choice between saving one person on one side of the dock, but ten people who've just gone down together in a sinking raft on the other side of the dock, utilitarians would say it is not the moral thing to do to save the 1 person -- you need to do the greatest good for the greatest number.
Important philosophers who stand for the principle of utilitarianism include John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham.
Another possible school of thought to use on the negative side are the social contract theorists. These guys basically argue that a government must serve the people that elected them. A community of people each give up a little of their own personal freedom to live together in a community, so that the leaders of that community can protect them and treat them fairly. That's the social contract. Thomas Jefferson said "The freedom and happiness of man . . . are the sole objects of all legitimate government." Governments exist to serve their own people, not to serve other people who are not part of the community they govern. Thus the social contract would suggest that a government has a moral obligation to serve its own people, but that it would be wrong to focus on conflicts outside the boundaries of its own people unless there was some direct link to protecting its people by fighting in that international conflict.
Famous social contract theorists include Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson and all the guys who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
I hope this helps. I've grossly oversimplified these theories of course, so you should be sure to do some of your own reading and research on these ideas, but sometimes it helps to get a bit of a roadmap into the major concepts to know where to start your research.