It is morally permissible to kill one innocent person to save the lives of many innocent people.

Thanks to my opponent for this debate. REPLIES: I'm just going to go down his case and talk about each part. Value: My valuie does not contradict, as my opponent claims. "Conforming to a standard of right behavior" is a very vague term. My opponent seems to think that it means that we have to conform to what the majority thinks. He is wrong. I argued that this standard is free standing of human belief, and morality is either right or wrong, and it is not determined by humans. We may follow morality, but we do not determine it. Contention1: So because of necessity, morality is temporarily cast aside to make way for what we think we need to do? How is this situation going to give justice? It will not. We are being selfish beings and are killing and innocent person, just so that we can save others. We are valuing the other people more than that one person. That one person does not matter as much, merely because he is in the minority. That is like saying it is ok to kill all the people with AIDs, because in doing so, we save all the people that the people with AIDS would have hurt. Justifying killing to save others is like Hitler justifying killing all the Jewish people because he believed they were a threat. Is this moral? My opponent argues that killing without justice is wrong. How is this situation giving justice? We are killing one innocent person. Repeat. WE ARE KILLING AN INNOCENT PERSON. It doesn't matter why. Trying to justify it would only make it worse. We can never justify killing. However, that does not mean that we will not do it. In this situation, if you kill the one person, you may be doing the immoral thing, but you may think that it is necessary. War is immoral, that's what I think. War is immoral, but we will still go to war because not going to war would be disastrous. But it is still immoral. Necessity does not outrule the fact that it is still immoral. This is basically the crux of your case. However, you contradict yourself here. Earlier in the debate, I mentioned that morality is not flexible. An act is either right or wrong. There is not gray area. My opponent never refuted this. Instead, he argued about the "conforming" part of my definition. But he accepted that morality is not flexible. However, in this statement above, it carries with it the assumption that this will change morality. Killing is ok, as long as it is the lesser of 2 evils. That is what my opponent claims. So morality is now flexible, according to my opponent. He earlier accepted that morality is not flexible. Contradiction. Wrong. I believe that killing is immoral. It can never be morally justified. We can justify killing someone by saying that killing someone is better than not killing them, but it would not justify it morally. It would not take a bad act and turn it into a good act. No. I said that either side is immoral, but we are going to choose one to do. < Saying that morals are not affected by humans mean that there lies a strict protocol of what is wrong or right.> Again, you misunderstand me. Morality is, simply put, what is right and wrong and why. It is a strict code. What I said is that humans cannot change morality to better suit out needs. Wrong. I have refuted all your scenarios because the purpose of them was to prove it is ok to kill, and I showed that it is definitley immoral to kill. No. We say it is wrong to kill. The ends do not justify the means, because the act with which you use to justify the ends is an immoral act. If we can justify killing one person to save many more because it saves more people, then we can kill all the people with AIDs because we are saving all the lives that they would eventually hurt. We can kill all the people with disease because they will spread the disease to others. We would save those people by killing all with disease. We could systematically destroy anyone because we think that they will hurt more people. We could preemptively go to war, before they can hurt us. We should blast Iran with nuclear bombs, because if we don't they will first. Is that enough of a ripple effect for you? If you want another example, look at Hitler. He justified killing 6 million people because he convinced the German people that doing otherwise would be disastrous and that they saved more people by killing the 6 million people. Throughout this entire debate, my opponent has been arguing the same thing. We must kill one to save others because we save more lives that way. However, he has constantly missed a point that I made early on, that he continually ignores or forgot about. Just because we must do an act because it is necessary, it does not make that act moral. I have shown that killing is an immoral act. My opponent replied with, 'But we need to!' Again. Neccesity does not justify morality. Neccesity and morality are 2 different things. There is a very fine line between them, and my opponent has constantly ignored the line that I established and he accepted. My opponent has assumed them to be the same thing. I established early on that they are not. My opponent ignored this and continued to argue otherwise. So, using that one statement, I have refuted all my opponent's points. His job was to justify killing. He did not. My job was to show that it is immoral to kill. I did so. If you look at it, either choice is immoral. You are still killing someone. My opponent did not refute that. I win Thank you