The Most Reliable Basis For Determining Morality Is Via Secular Means

They decided to start by dropping a bomb, so I'll up the ante by seeing their bomb and raising them one Hiroshima. Do I get extra credit for bad puns? There is no good or bad in secular ethics. Let us start from the presumption that I'm wrong about this. Consider a moral claim. Pro defined morality as "what we consider to be right or wrong" - present tense, future indicative. A moral claim, therefore, is in effect a prediction about the future made in the present and based on a near-future alternative. Pro gave several good examples of moral claims, so I'll just borrow one - "9/11 was bad". Now how do we know whether that moral claim is true? The validity of any claim can only be tested by excluding all alternative claims, and can only be even determined as probable through the exclusion of some alternative claims. Something is only "certain" when no alternatives can be true. For example, say I come across a body of water. It is possible that it is a bay, but it could be a lake. Only when I circumnavigate it, or possibly just check Google Maps, can I be sure of what it really is. Let's apply that method. So to check whether the claim "9/11 was bad" is true, we need to that the world would be better off if 9/11 had not happened. The problem with that is that you can't change time. For all we know Family Guy got it right and 9/11 not happening would in fact be way, way worse (not going to source that because it's not "reliable" - but then nothing about morality is). Because we can't change time, moral claims cannot be tested. Because moral claims cannot be tested, it is impossible to say for a certainty whether 9/11 harmed or benefited people more. And because of this, no moral claim can be verified. Moreover, even if you can somehow prove that 9/11 was bad when it happened relative to the opportunity cost (which we don't know and cannot even reliably predict), that does not imply it will be morally bad for me to do the same thing to any other set of buildings in the future. It's like killing somebody. Most people agree murder is wrong, but what about in war? What about euthanasia? Abortion? Then it's a completely different moral question (and there are hundreds of other examples of "exceptions" like these many people hold). Therefore, morality is generally accepted (although we cannot prove it, just like nothing can be proved with morality) to be context-dependant. Since the world is always changing as time goes on, moral values of individual actions change as well. And what's more, moral claims are subjectively relative. What I mean by that is that most actions do not merely have "good" or "bad" consequences, but some good and some bad. How important each of those are to us depends, naturally, on who we are. Think 9/11. Was it bad for the average guy who happened to be in the twin towers at the time? You bet. But was it bad for the oil tycoons who benefited from the resulting Iraq war? Well . .. maybe, maybe not. Different context means different implications for moral values of actions. Maybe the apocalypse will strike tomorrow and the value of all moral decisions today becomes utterly irrelevant compared to the changed circumstances humanity faces. This is further complicated by the fact humans have competing wants - my conception of a utopia is probably very different from yours, so we probably make quite different moral judgements. The claim that secularism can "determine" morality is incompatible with secular logic. The value of a moral claim in religious morality is contingent on the existence of God. Assuming that God does not exist, every claim pro makes about religious morality does sound pretty shocking, I agree. Assuming God does exist, it sounds like humanity is best off going to heaven earlier (after all, God, being omniscient and all, would know the true value of different moral claims). So religious morality is contingent on the existence of God much like secular morality is contingent upon being able to look into crystal balls. The existence of God, however, like what secularists see in their crystal balls, can not be logically proven either. That's because if God did exist, then God would be so powerful as to be able to defy logic. Therefore, even if God is logically impossible, God could still exist, for God is not contingent on logic (the reverse, however, is possible - that logic is contingent on God). In laymen's terms, the religious folks can't verify their moral claims any more than the secular folks can. When it comes to the future, both are just as clueless. Moral systems give absolute answers to relative questionsAny moral system, regardless of where it claims to be "derived" from, gives answers to moral problems. The problem is that moral claims are about uncertainty and things we cannot predict. At issue is whether it is better to give a certain answer to an uncertain problem, or whether we should toss a coin to change our responses to moral questions as they arise. Aside from Murphy's Law, predicting the unpredictable with any kind of certainty has been empirically proven to be worse than telling a chimp to throw darts (. http://healthland.time.com...) while more uncertainty over the future is, unsurprisingly, correlated with making more accurate predictions. The question is whether giving the same answer to a problem with a chance of being right is better than giving a chance answer. In fact, any strategy for determining the most moral action which involves switching will always yield greater odds of picking good outcomes, provided that there is at least one outcome you would consider bad which you can exclude. In statistics, this is called the Monty Hall problem (. http://en.wikipedia.org...), but it's intuitive in this case because the moral systems might advocate those alternatives that are the wrong ones. As a matter of fact, my opponent has provided ample evidence that they do, and that he believes there are "wrong" alternatives (whether this is actually true or not, I'm trying to prove the relative advantage of flipping a coin, relative to my opponent's given assumptions of morality). Therefore, as we learn more about what we individually define as moral results, our best option is to change our moral actions. Any morality "derived" from a body of axioms - be they based on an absolutist devotion to science like perhaps Sam Harris' secular morality, or an absolutist devotion to God like fans of Nick Cage - give objective moral answers to these subjective problems, and that is why they fail. I look forward to my opponent's rebuttals.