The Most Reliable Basis For Determining Morality Is Via Secular Means

Pro is wrong about religious morality, but we agree on the conclusion so it's not worth arguing over. Relgious morality is contingent on God. The way I see it, the crux of this debate is really whether secular morality is contingent on correctly predicting the future.There is no good or bad in secular ethics.Let us apply the process of exclusion I discussed earlier to the question "are speed limits moral". For this to be true, "speed limits are not moral" must be false. To work that out, we need to know what the moral outcomes will be if any given person speeds. Pro has absolutely no clue what these are, but to paraphrase their whole argument, "we can make a pretty reasonable guess".I mean it when I say "guess". You can't prove that the murder of a person will lead to more harm than good. Maybe that person would have become the next Hitler. Maybe Family Guy was right that 9/11 was a pretty good thing. His standard is what seems reasonable given evidence - that's an extrapolation, which is another word for guess.So first, my claim was that any "good" and "bad" secular logic claims can't be verified and thus aren't true. Pro conceeds the first part and advocates guessing based on evidence instead, being as close to the truth as pro likes to get. The inherent assumption here is that the evidence makes your guesses more reliable. Speed limits just so happen to be a perfect example of why this isn't the case. The vast majority of the time when breaking the speed limit, nobody gets hurt (for example, when overtaking). It simply increases the observed rate of accidents. But accidents actually aren't often caused by speeding at all - speeding increases the damage for those that do have accidents, relative to the safety features of the vehicle, which are evolving all the time. That's why going over 100kmph on the highway was a lot more dangerous in 1970 than it is today. That's one of the reasons why accidents on the German Autobahn have been gradually decreasing for ages (http://en.wikipedia.org...). Furthermore, the observed rate of accidents doesn't instantly become "bad" once you start breaking the speed limit. According to my opponent's logic, all accidents are bad. So why not reduce the speed limit by 10kmph, and get less accidents? There isn't any speed you can say is the optimal compromise, and no amount of evidence will help you in making that determination. I guess the more general principle that pro is trying to push is that morality is about the aversion of risk, and driving fast is risky, but then again all driving is risky. Not driving can be risky too. The relative risks and rewards may seem statistically quantifiable, but only based on past moral actions, not future ones. That's the problem.Moreover, reasonableness is itself pretty vague. I might consider 110kmph to be more reasonable than 90kmph. The amount of reasonable objection to any given law, I think, justifies this point. Drugs are a big one. Is marijuana legalisation reasonable? Some drugs are reasonably dangerous, some are not, but marijuana seems to be on the borderline in people's general moral conscience. The secular answer pro is advocating? "Look at the evidence and guess for yourself". I discuss in more detail as part of my point why making certain moral judgments on the basis of certain criteria actually makes you less of an expert when the outcome is completely uncertain.A third but more minor problem is that pro premised their case on certain axioms that are unjustifiable, for instance, that everybody prefers life to death (what about suicides?) or health to sickness (plenty of drug addicts will disagree) etc. It isn't necessary since there would be nothing wrong with pro admitting secular morality is subjective (it is), but the foundations on which pro has built some pretense of an objective morality cannot be justified since there are clear empirical examples of them not being true.Of course I cannot PROVE that certain actions (ie 9/11) were more harmful than the alternative because like pro, I have no idea what the alternative is. In the same way, he can't prove that it's better than the alternative because pro's alternative (a world that sounds exactly the same as ours just without the wars and the twin towers still standing) is in all probability a fantasy. There are innumerable possible alternatives, and which one happens is impossible to predict given that the crystal ball has not yet been invented. So I'm not going to predict it, and it's simple arrogance to claim that just because something looks like an acceptable answer to a presently observable risk, that adopting that answer won't be a still greater risk, or that the answer will actually work. Maybe without 9/11, the west would have more compassion and empathy with the Muslim world.The fourth problem is that secular answers do not allow for contingency. To some extent it is true that this is false - speed limits can be changed in wet weather, for example. But there are contingencies which will always come up which people haven't thought of yet. You cannot give a moral answer based on past reasonable assumptions if an event is unprecedented, for example. That's a problem for secular morality because history does not conveniently repeat like that. Each time anything happens, the circumstances are different.At the end of the day, morality is about consequences that will happen, and secularism uses only evidence. From the future, we have no evidence. Therefore the two are irreconcilable, beyond the "oh yeah, that sounds good" standard of "reasonableness". Until pro justifies how we can know for certain what is reasonable, there is no good or bad in secular ethics.Moral systems give absolute answers to relative questionsI didn't ignore pro's point, in fact, my case relied on it. Coin tosses are only more reliable if you can exclude at least one alternative, so by excluding the ten things pro doesn't want to see happen (regardless of their moral value) a coin toss would be better. Secular morality can easily be used to justify all of them. For example, if a country had just saved millions of lives by extracting information under torture, torture all of a sudden sounds reasonable. The problem is that secular morality, like all moral systems, gives absolute answers, in this case based only on what we know, which is a bit silly since we don't know the future. Pro thinks torture is bad, so following his moral code he would not have saved those millions of lives. I might add that a coin toss would not have led to torture either, since pro excluded that alternative. The difference is that a coin toss would not be prescriptive as to what the right answer is. If one solution has worked in the past, the secular view is to make that the moral solution - it worked back then, after all. In truth, this is almost never the case. A coin toss is thus more likely to generate a favorable alternative. This is both statistically necessary and empirically true."the group that does better than it is ironically the one that applies more rational and wider analytical thought, exactly in line with what secular thinking entails"This is NOT what secular thinking entails (which is moral certainty over probabalistic events), nor what the article says. They said that the group that were the most rational and analytical about it realised that they knew the least, and thus generalised their conclusions more, rather than making any specific moral assumptions (ie torture is bad). They beat the chimps because that way they could cover multiple bases of possibility at the same time. I'm not holding secularism to a perfect standard, but the point is that there is zero evidence that it actually works better than a random guess. It's all well and good to say that it's OK because it's reasonable, but I want to know why.In conclusion, the moral value of past events does not indicate the moral value of future events.