Zaradi's Prized Tournament: Resource Extraction in Developing Nations

My argument will take the following form: P.1. That which arises out of voluntary choice is that which should be. P.2. The prioritization of resource extraction has arisen and will arise out of voluntary choice. C. The prioritization of resource extraction is that which should be. Premiss One: When dealing with any moral issue, one must keep in mind the purpose of favouring any system of morality at all. Why is it that some goals and the means to the achievement of those goals should be better than others? The answer is that morality is useful only insofar as it can guide action – no morality which gives one no metric by which to judge the better of two alternatives can be worthwhile, and to assert otherwise would be to say that a map is worthwhile without a destination. Insofar as this is true, it can be seen that a prerequisite for any moral system is the presence of choice. When one decides to act in accordance with a moral system, they must do so of their own free will. In the same way that you would not say that a slave has chosen to build a monument to his master, any coercive act destroys the ability of a man to choose. Because of this, any moral system, if it is not self-defeating, must restrict all interactions between people to the realm of voluntary cooperation and trade. To say that that which is chosen freely should be otherwise is to say that, in order for an action to be in-line with morality, it must not be left up to the individual to choose (which has been shown to be ridiculous). It is the individual himself who must make value judgements – no one else may make them for him, and trying to do so is antithetical to the idea of morality. . If people are allowed to own and trade property (which is necessary to call them free), then they must be able to do whatever they want with that property. If a man wishes to, say, poison the local wildlife population, to stop him would be to dictate what his values should be, something that he must choose for himself. In this way, the only things that should be are those which individuals, on their own terms, actually choose. No-one may tell them otherwise. Premiss Two: To find out if environmental protection should be valued over resource extraction, then, we must look to see what individuals actually do. More specifically, we must look at what those in control of the means to produce and control the resources of a country do (as it has already been established that all that matters is he who has the power to make the choice being examined – any citizens or government officials are irrelevant). This is fairly easy to see. In the majority of cases in developing countries, the environment has been damned in order to produce more (as seen in, for instance, the sources my opponent presents to support his case – most clearly in ones such as [1]). If it is true that property owners disregard the environment as a whole, then, overall, they have chosen that resource extraction is of more value than the environment voluntarily. Conclusion: It has been shown that the only morally sound position is that which arises when people are given the liberty to choose their own paths and values, and it has been shown that, in developing countries, resource extraction has been chosen over the environment. If this argument holds, then no objections can be made to the status quo, and there can be no question of what otherwise should be. To refute my argument, it must be shown that either a moral system can exist in which people cannot choose to follow it, or it must be shown that such a valid moral system is not desirable (and both are untenable). [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk...