This house believes in Utilitarianism over its rivals.

Pro has continued to misrepresent what I am saying. Hopefully our readers see through Pro's false claims but just in case I will do my best to clarify my position yet again. Theories rest on some fixed point and this point gives rise to a whole set of beliefs. Pragmatism recognizes that this "fixed point" is not necessarily the same for every argument or theory. The Nozick quote I cited in R3 explains this idea quite well: "The fact that a particular theory has a fixed point does not show that this very same point must or will be held fixed by every plausible theory. And it does not show the theory under consideration is unable successively to transform itself by using its own then accepted standards, so that this point and even these very standards get modified." When I said that facts rely on other facts, what I meant in the context of my argument is that our beliefs are dependent on a "fixed point" which itself is open to transformation. These fixed points can transform themselves using the very standards they give rise to, and thus in the process of transformation, the very standards that produce change in the first place can end up modified. Pragmatists maintain that everything is open to transformation. The fixed point in any system can change producing a change in the system itself. Pro never addresses this. Furthermore, pragmatists say there is no independent epistemological mechanism for determining which "fixed point" is ultimately correct. The reason for this is because the means by which we know the world is limited by our inability to step outside our own perspective. We our human beings, and as human beings our understanding is limited by the horizon of our experience. We can only see the world from our limited perspective, and as such our understanding of the world will always be mediated by our experience of it. We cannot evaluate or judge our beliefs in a neutral way that is not limited by our location in time and space. I made this argument in R2 yet Pro has continued to ignore it. Instead, Pro claims without any substantiation whatsoever that "brute facts" must exist. The lack of substantiation for Pro's claim is sufficient evidence to dismiss the claim but the problems with Pro's argument do not stop there. Pro's point is a complete misrepresentation of my position because I never said "brute facts" cannot exist. What I said is that we do not have epistemic access to these "brute facts" and therefore no way of knowing with absolute certainty which beliefs are correct and which beliefs are wrong. This does not mean that these brute facts don't in actuality exist. We simply cannot know what they are. Pro claims I must "recreate logic and reason with a different set of assumptions from the ground up to justify his argument that it is possible." I this this is an abusive burden that cannot be met in the short space of a debate. What I can do is make reference to authorities on the subject like Robert Nozick, as I did in R3, and offer examples of what are known as "paraconsistent logics" through a reference to the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu... This link provides the example of discursive logic by the logician Jaśkowski, a non-adjunctive logic by Rescher and Manor, preservationism by Jennings and Scotch, and a bevy of other paraconsistent logics. I highly recommend readers take a look at them. Since this is a side point to the debate, I will not discuss them in detail except to make my point that the law of non-contradiction is not essential to logic or reason. Pro's claim that pragmatism is the equivalent of coherentism is false. I already explained that pragmatists affirm "fixed points" that serve as conditional foundations. This counters both coherentism and infinitism as an objection. Pro claims that an appeal to intuition is more likely to make something wrong. His argument is that, because some intuitions are wrong, therefore appealing to intuition is more likely to make something wrong. Pro's argument fails because 1) there are many intuitions that are correct, 2) most ethical intuitions (the relevant ones to this debate) are correct, 3) intuitions change to reflect advances in knowledge, and 4) Pro has not shown there to be any recurring pattern or correlation whatsoever between something being wrong being the result of an appeal to intuition. I would argue that, when it comes to ethics, our intuitions are right more often than they are wrong. Pro is correct that pragmatists may choose to derive moral knowledge from a utilitarian calculus. This may or may not happen depending on the circumstances. The point here is that the form of moral reasoning chosen depends on the circumstances. If it is discovered at some point in the future that there is a better way to establish a moral judgment, then pragmatists will choose that over utilitarian forms of reasoning. Whatever works best is what will be chosen. Pro claims moral decisions should be based on "intuitive" moral rules. The irony of this claim is that Pro has spent a good deal of his time arguing that appeals to intuition are flawed and incoherent. This puts Pro in a double bind. If Pro accepts his argument that appealing to intuition makes something more likely to be wrong, then Pro implicitly admits that utilitarians will often act immorally. Furthermore, if we accept that appealing to intuitions are an acceptable practice, then utilitarians still run into the problem of the eventual conflict between our ethical intuitions and the utilitarian calculus. There will eventually be a novel situation (as I explained in R3) in which people do not know what the utilitarian calculus would say. If that person then follows their intuition and their intuition conflicts with the judgment of the utilitarian calculus, Pro would in effect be saying that utilitarians are allowed to act immorally because it is the only practical solution. Which is exactly why I now claim that Pro is a closet pragmatist, since Pro is choosing the practicality of an action OVER AND ABOVE the judgment of the utilitarian calculus. I think this point weighs so heavily in my favor that I want to say it again. Pro has chosen to adopt a modified utilitarian framework in which the practicality of an action is more important than its morality according to the utilitarian calculus. To put it another way, Pro is choosing what works as opposed to the maximization of utiltiy. This is pragmatism, not utilitarianism. Pro claims utilitarianism is open to improvement. It may be the case that utilitarians are open to improvement but they are not open to change: utilitarians will always believe in the moral imperative to maximize utility. This will never change, and if advance and improvement means adopting a different form of moral reasoning, then utilitarians will always fall short. Point is, pragmatists are flexible and more responsive to change. Pro's arguments thus fail. The Ring of Gyges problem does not apply. Pragmatism is not the equivalent of ethical egoism. Further, Game Theory and Evolutionary Biology both show that, even if egoism is accepted, agents will cooperate, not harm others. This problem applies to utilitarianism however. If a doctor has the option of sacrificing a healthy patient without being discovered to save 5 lives. utilitarians would say the doctor should do that. This is not an acceptable ethical result. It shows that quantifying human life and happiness does not produce ethical results. Since Pro's conclusion comes back to intuition, I will too. Pro invokes pragmatism's appeal to intuition as its greatest fault. Yet if what Pro tells us is correct, utilitarianism appeals to intuition as well. This calls the logical consistency of Pro's argument as a whole into question. Pragmatism is better on every level, epistemology, intuition, logical consistency, flexibility, openness to progress, and practicality.