Individuals Have A Moral Obligation To Assist People In Need

Consider, if you would, a thought experiment. Suppose that I am a student of physics relatively new to the discipline. Suppose further that, during a lecture, the professor asks why fire rises. Not knowing myself, I ask the professor why this is so. In turn, the professor points me to an Aristotelian theory which claims that, because the telos of fire is "up", there is no other direction in which fire may proceed. As you might expect, this answer comes off as peculiar to me, even if my understanding of physics is limited. After I provide reasons in light of which this theory is unlikely to be true, my professor calmly rebuts, "You can't disagree with my theory. You have no idea what the answer is, by your own admission, and you have offered no alternative theory; therefore, my theory, which explains everything, is the one you must accept."The prevailing question regarding this experiment, I think, is whether I actually must accept a particular theory in light of ignorance and an absence of counterargument. Similar to the professor's rejoinder, DP seems to have made an argument that, because I have not proven the converse to be true, and because I have not presented a case of my own, we must necessarily accept the affirmative position; however, it seems to me, as is hopefully made clear by the thought experiment, that neither proof of the converse nor even a case of one's own are necessary conditions for negation. One is still perfectly justified in claiming that fire does not rise because of its telos, even if one does not know the actual explanation. Similarly, I believe that I am quite justified in explaining the inadequacies of DP's position, even if I do not aggressively argue the opposite. As I've noted, it is quite possible that such an obligation exists. We could certainly conceive of a world in which this is the case; however, my task, as the negative, is to demonstrate that the affirmative is unsuccessful in proving the resolution. I believe my critique has done such. It seems, to me, that the affirmative counterargument relies upon two fallacies, then: first, a fallacy of ignorance, in which one assumes the necessary truth of one proposition through the absence of proof to the contrary. For instance, even if I am unable to demonstrate that two and two is four, we cannot thereby conclude that it is actually five. Second, a fallacy of silence, in which one assumes, because there are no objections or countervailing theories, that the theory one has presented is necessarily true. Unfortunately, the mere fact that I have not argued definitively for the absence of such an obligation does not entitle DP to think in such a way. Recall that, while I am open to the possibility of this obligation, it stands to reason, based on my commentary, that DP's case fails to establish this obligation beyond a reasonable doubt.Given, then, that these fallacies form the foundation of DP's counterarguments in Round 3, and given further that my commentary--which deals specifically with the adequacy of the standards and the logic employed by the contentions to ground the obligation--remains unaddressed, it seems as though you have many reasons to adopt my heavy skepticism about the grounding of this obligation. Though DP does suggest that I lack evidence suggesting the non-existence of the obligation, I think the logical issues in the contentions provide me with sufficient non-empirical such that evidence of non-existence seems unnecessary. I leave these judgments to your reason, however, and remain as hopeful as I can that my commentary will be directly addressed in the following rounds.