Resolved: It is morally permissible to kill one innocent person to save the lives of many innocent

Thanks to my opponent for the debate. Some definitions that I present myself. Moral: 1 a: of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior : ethical b: expressing or teaching a conception of right behavior c: conforming to a standard of right behavior d: sanctioned by or operative on one's conscience or ethical judgment e: capable of right and wrong action Permissible: that may be permitted. Therefore, morally permissible means that it is not forbidden to do a certain act, according to moral principles. TOPIC ANALYSIS: The way I see it, this debate is about whether or not it is ok to kill one person to save many more people. Let it be restated that all of these people are innocent people. They have done nothing wrong. The burden of this debate lies with my opponent. My opponent must prove that killing one INNOCENT person is morally justified to save many innocent people. My job is to disprove my opponents arguments. If I am successful in doing so, using any method I see fit, then I win this debate. I do not have to prove that it is not morraly permissible to kill one innocent person to save the lives of many innocent. I will do it anyways, to make a stronger case, but it is not required. What is required of me is that I refute all of my opponents arguments. If I am able to do that, I win the debate. Now to refute my opponent's points: 1. Life is indeed valuable. It is so valuable, we can never justify taking it. If we try to justify taking life in order to save life, we are devaluing life. That is wrong. It is not the right and logical thing to do because we can never justify taking life, because it is so valuable. Nothing gives us the right to take life, not even to save others. If you do indeed justify taking life, then you are devaluing life itself, and that is wrong. 2. So? Just because less people will die does not justify killing that person in the first place. This is a utilitarianist view. This asks us to take an objective view of this action. However, that is not possible. We are not able to objectively look at the world, because we have a conscience. We all feel emotions. We all know that killing is wrong. Yet what my opponent seeks to do is show us that killing is not wrong. My points: 1. You cannot justify killing. Killing is killing, and we can never justify doing it. In the situation provided by the topic, many of us would kill that one person to save many more. Yet some of us would not. We all know that killing is wrong. When you save the many more people, you are killing. If you are one of the people who would kill that one person, you would not do it without any hesitation. Most of us would be split, and would only do one thing or another because they feel they have no choice. If we chose to kill that one person, would we feel good about ourselves? Most would not. We would second guess ourselves. We would doubt our decisions. Our conscience would tell us that we are doing a immoral act in killing. Therefore, neither of the choices presented by the topic are morally permissible. 2. If you allow to kill one to save many, you are altering our system of morality. You are justifying killing. Also, whoever gets to decide could put us on a slippery slope. You could justify killing just about anyone, because we all have to potential kill many more innocent. Even if I am an innocent person, we all carry the potential to harm many others. Therefore, you could justify killing anyone. That is wrong. Thank you