Resolved: All but the nihilist shares an operative form of faith.

Pro claims that morality requires a leap of faith. I pointed out that leaps of faith go in unpredictable directions, so leaps of faith have taken people to believing that moral behavior comprises slavery, human sacrifice, jihad, and genocide. Pro explains that those products of faith are subordinate to the one critical leap of faith that everyone supposedly makes. That leap is that "humanity matters." All social animals behave as if their species matters. Deer, elephants, monkeys, wolves, and orcas, to name a few, have collective behaviors that protect their groups. "Deer matter" is ingrained in deer, "elephants matter" is ingrained in elephants, and so forth. References I cited show that the behaviors of social animals mirror the behavior of the human species to a remarkable degree, down to the occurrence of wayward individuals within the group. Social animals other than man cannot articulate their rules of behavior as "beliefs," but the equivalent of moral rules clearly governs behavior nonetheless. No one contends that social animals are deriving their equivalent of moral rules by leaps of faith. It follows that no leap of faith is required, that rules of behavior are determined by instinct. Mankind has complex instincts providing for protection of the self, the family, and his society. Moreover, man can consider whether something that seems beneficial in the short run is harmful in the long run, or whether in fact it is really beneficial at all. Man must make trade offs among his instinctual allegiances while attempting to reason the true effects of actions. The largely static tribal environment of prehistory has been displaced by the complex challenges of the rises of civilization. Hence we have to evolve new rules of morality to deal with the complicated relationships. Pro claims that only a "leap of faith" resolves the Milgram experiments, in which an authority figure directs a subject to apparently torture a victim (actually an actor) in another room with electric shocks. I pointed out that since many people complied with direction from the authority, the leap of faith that Pro supposes as universal did not exist. Pro proclaimed that outcome a paradox. The outcome is completely consistent with my model of attempting to reason a resolution among conflicting instincts. It's at once reasonable to trust a university researcher giving instructions, and yet it conflicts with the instinct not to harm others. Recall the Pro already opted out of his supposed leap of faith operating even at the level of human sacrifice or other atrocities. It could not therefore be applied at the level of the Milgram experiment. It turns out that the leap of faith accepting that "humanity matters." which is supposed to be the entire necessary basis of morality, has no operative consequences at all. It did not in fact stop Milgram subjects from torture, and more than it stops atrocities committed under assorted errant leaps of faith. Pro argues, "If all actions we are programmed to perform are moral, questions about morality become meaningless. For that matter, despite my repeated challenges, Con has failed to explain why acting outside of the norm or the genetic code, as did the Unabomber, would be immoral." Notice that Pro acknowledged that the Unabomber acted outside of the norm. If whether something is outside of the norm for the species is a moral question, then Pro asked a meaningful moral question, and he answered it. My claim is that acting according to the norm for the species is the definition of morality. Pro had no trouble acknowledging that behaviors occur outside the norm and judging them as such, per the case of the Unabomber. Pro cannot complain that I have failed to provide the meaning of moral questions, nor that the meaning leads to answers. He implicitly acknowledges that I've done that. His objection has to be that defining "morality" to mean "action in accord the normal behavior of the human species" is not the correct definition of morality. The arguments I presented in support of my claim included: 1. We can perform thought experiments on defining morality for supposed intelligent creatures having different instincts from human. For praying mantis instincts, morality would have to allow the female to consume her mate after mating. For codfish, morality would have to allow eating the offspring. If we did not allow those behaviors as moral, the species would be endangered, and every species has the instinct to survive. 2. Moral questions that are difficult for us to resolve can be well-understood in terms of competing instincts. Thus I could readily explain the Milgram experiment, while Pro's leap of faith hypothesis leaves it a paradox. 3. There are many easy questions of morality that straightforwardly explained by moral being in conformance to instinct. For example, self-defense being morally permissible derives directly from recognition of the instinct for self-preservation. Pro says, "Con, of course, emphasizes lines of the code like survival instincts while ignoring reptilian coding which is not as warm and fuzzy." What is it about reptilian behavior that is *not* warm and fuzzy? It is, of course, survival behavior -- which Pro just proclaimed to be warm and fuzzy. Keep in mind that Pro proclaimed immoral behavior to be a paradox, because it did not follow from his idea that everyone took a leap of faith to the warm and fuzzy place that "humanity matters." I have no problem explaining behaviors as aberrant or a consequence of conflicting instincts. Pro sometimes implies that I am claiming that all behavior is programmed, and he sometimes supposes I must be implying that all behavior is therefore moral. I made it clear that I believe that there is a norm for the species and that immoral behavior was departure from the norm. Every person has a unique genetic code, so that provides inherent variation, and every person runs his code in a different environment: the garbage in, garbage out principle. Pro provided the Unabomber as an example of departure from the norm. Pro protests that I did not derive specific human rights from the nature of man during the course of this debate. Rather than attempting that myself, I referenced the Founders, who did so and proclaimed them "self-evident." Pro says that Deists believed in God, and implies that supports his case that they were derived from faith. I said quite plainly that Deists believed in God. However, the Deists did not believe in scripture or revelation. Thus the only way to know God's will was through "natural law," meaning observation. The observation is the same whether or not one believes God was the origin of it or not. A Deist would say that F = m*a because that is the way that God designed the universe, but the only way to learn F = m*a is by observation. At that point God is irrelevant. The Founders may have gotten some inspiration from Locke, but my book-length reference makes the Deist beliefs of the Founders abundantly clear, and they are as I have summarized. They derive rights from observation of mankind. Pro supposes I am saying, "Operate according to your programming, obey the latest cultural evolution and, bingo, you are moral." Pro omits the lengthy explanations I gave for the existence of unresolved and difficult moral conflicts, and for new moral question arising from advances in technology. Nonetheless, there are clear moral and questions and many of them have clear answers, and those are readily derived from the nature of mankind. Pro claims that morality is ultimately determined by a leap of faith. But given the wild leaps of faith that have occurred taking morality to embrace slavery and human sacrifice, leaps of faith resolve virtually no moral questions. Pro claims it gives us "humanity matters," but nothing of consequence follows from it. The resolution is negated.