Spanking children is immoral.

First, I'd like to refute Pro's claim that I am putting in minimal effort for this debate. This is surely not the case. I knew coming into this debate the effects of spanking children and never thought to try to contest or dispute them. It was Pro's presupposed jump from the descriptive nature of spanking to the normative claim of immorality that I was more interested in. Debates dealing with the ethics of specific acts often fail to justify whatever standard they're applying and it was this meta-ethical topic I have interest in debating. And since specified ethical prescriptions are contingent on meta-ethics, Pro is burdened to meta-ethically justify his standard before the application of it can be justified.Pro has done nothing to bridge the is-ought gap which I brought attention to in the last round. Though he has refashioned the wording of his argument somewhat, the basic premises remain the same. Pro is arguing that since spanking has X effects, it is wrong. However, the whole point I brought last round was that there is no reason to think that X effects are wrong in the normative sense. Pro can call to attention every single outcome, effect, or characteristic of 'spanking' and we would still not have a legitimate meta-ethical evaluative premise concerning what it is exactly makes an action 'good' or 'bad'.Obviously, based on a hypothetical imperative[1], Pro's case would be legitimate (in a sense). A hypothetical imperative is used to determine future actions based on assumed goals. For instance, if I want a Tv, then I should get a job. Pro's argument is of a similar nature. He argues that if you want your children to become well adjusted, then you shouldn't spank them. But an if-then imperative is wholly different from an is-ought imperative. And the latter is what normative morality is about. The former is contingent on agreed upon goals.See, in a hypothetical imperative, we can logically deduce the conclusion from the premise. The proposition that you want a Tv has contained within it other propositions as well. For instance, Tv's cost money --> money is scarce --> and getting a job is among the most common ways of getting money. There's a very clear and consistent flow of reasoning here. Hence, no further premise is needed. And yet again, there are major differences with is-ought imperatives. There's nothing contained within the effects of spanking a child that would lead one to logically conclude that spanking is wrong, because we don't have a consistent or justified valuation of what exactly 'wrong' is.To conclude, Pro's reasoning would be great if a universal goal was assumed (i.e., creating well adjusted people). However, this just isn't the case. When dealing with morality (i.e., a categorical imperative of sorts), we are dealing with a universal prescription of behavior. And as my hypothetical imperative example has shown, prescriptions of behavior can only be logically deduced by an assumed goal. So since creating well adjusted people is not a universally sound ethical goal (although it sounds like common sense, it isn't justified in a logico-philosophical sense), Pro's reasoning by hypothetical imperative fails.===Sources===[1] http://plato.stanford.edu...