The access to drinking water ought to be valued as a human right instead of as a commodity.

Introduction: Thanks to ThePhilosophersDeduction for offering this challenge. I've made a few occasional returns to DDO, but often forgotten about my debates because of how busy I often am! But I've had very little in the way of writing this semester and I don't want to be rusty when final papers roll around, so I thought a philosophical debate was in order. Opening Comment/Analysis: Debate ultimately turns on the truth value of the resolution. If the resolution is demonstrated to be a true statement, then the debate goes to Pro, and otherwise it goes to Con. Hence, because the property of truth would not apply to it, a resolution like, “How are you doing today?” or “Wow!” could never be the resolution of a debate, and if it were, it would constitute an automatic defeat for Pro. I will argue that the resolution of this debate is in fact a resolution of that type. In order to demonstrate this, I will defend just one contention: that moral emotivism is true For LD purposes, my value is truth, and my criterion is also truth (since there does not seem to be a way of evaluating “how true” something is, it just is or it isn't.) Contention I: Moral Emotivism is True BBC gives a simple definition of emotivism: emotivism is the view that moral statements do nothing more than express the speaker's feelings about the issue. I will defend this claim with a two part argument. First, I will argue that objective moral values do not exist. Then I will argue that emotivism is the only other way to make sense of moral statements. Objective Moral Values Do Not Exist: A value as such cannot be objective. While it is a fact of the world that I value ice cream, my valuation of ice cream (that is, my thought that ice cream tastes good) is subjective. The statement “ice cream tastes good” may be true relative to me, but false relative to someone else. Independently of any subject, it simply does not make sense to debate the statement “ice cream is good.” So objectively, such values do not exist. A moral realist, however, will probably think that moral statements are something stronger than this. Could moral truths be facts of an abstract sort, like the facts of mathematics? I think that the answer is no. In order for something to be a fact of the world, it must correspond to the world in some way. Mathematical truths are instantiated in the laws of physics. If it were not the case that the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumstance is pi, then the world would assuredly be a very different place. It would be incomprehensible if it could exist it all. But suppose that some statement of ethics that a moral realist held to be true was actually false. What would be different about the world? It seems that nothing would change at all. So if there is no difference between a statement being true and it being false, does it even make sense to speak of it being true or false? There would be no way to detect the difference by appealing to any evidence since it would all be the same in both cases, and so there is no way that we could ever know objective moral values even if they did exist. Accordingly, we should reject moral realism. This alone is enough to warrant rejecting the resolution as false, though I will go on to argue further that it is not even admissible as a resolution. Emotivism Explains Moral Statements: So when people say that we should or ought do this or that, they might think that they're making a statement of an abstract kind, but such statements are not coherent. So what do they really mean? It makes the most sense to say that they are simply expressing their emotional preferences. People feel emotions like concern, empathy, and happiness, as well as jealousy and indignation, that make them think that things should be a certain way. We feel joy when we improve the lives of others, and we feel outrage when we see unfairness and injustice in the world. These feelings are the basis of moral statements. When we say that we ought to help others, it might be a pragmatically true statement if we both share the same values. But it is not objectively true any more than it is objectively true that we should eat ice cream. There is no principled reason why everyone must agree to this, it is only relative to our subjective experience. So, emotivism is the correct doctrine for ethics. Conclusion:It should be clear what follows from this. The resolution is a statement of ethics, and it can therefore be reduced to an expression of the authors feelings. It is not admissible as a resolution for a debate any more than a statement like “Yum, ice cream sure is great!” or “Bleh, dirt does not taste so good!” The resolution cannot be true, and it does not even make sense to speak of its being true. The debate goes to Con. Rebuttals: The resolution cannot possibly be true, so no sound arguments can be given in support of it. The truth of Pro's contentions are not at issue, the question is whether they could lend support to his thesis. But how could a statement about the conditions of people on our small planet, a mote of dust in the cosmic sky, lend evidence to a statement of ethics, which must stand beyond space beyond space and time itself? Accordingly, it may well be the case that people are better off in various ways in they have access to water. These are simple facts of biology and sociology. They do not and cannot make a statement of ethics true. Therefore, I concede that all of Pro's contentions insofar as they make statements of empirical fact. Insofar as they refer to ethics, the above argument applies.