The ends justify the means

It is too bad Pro has not condescended to addressing the apparent contradictions in his definition of "the ends justify the means" and his defense of it. I cannot use new arguments in this round, but in neglecting to address my previous statements, Pro makes it unnecessary to do anything more than to point to what I have already said and devellop it.First, he says a good outcome, or a good result, excuse wrongs committed to attain it. He has already all but acknowledged that it is not possible for s person to know the full ramifications of an action before they occur (as in his killing a dog to defend a toddler example, in which the owner of the dog commits suicide), therefore it is not so much the consequences which are morally relevant, but the intention and foreseen consequences.Then, Pro tries to sell us a "package deal" which renders the adage meaningless. If the ends include the means, then whenever we consider that a means of attaining a desirable result are so morally undesirable that they do not justify the action (as in the case of the person who cheats in order to get his degree) we can merely say that the end result (a cheater getting a degree) is the end. This does not describe the results excusing or not excusing the wrongs committed to attain it, but rather the consequences justifying the action in its entirety.J' Accuse le Mystique!All of this, (the equivocal use of terms and the fact that the explanation defends a completely different position from the one formally proposed and defined) by itself would be enough to negate the resolution, but I will further defend the alternative view I proposed in the previous rounds from the rather odd accusation of "mysticism".I find nothing wrong with mysticism per se (whoever doesn't admire the poetry of the Spanish mystic saint Theresa of Avila either has not read it or lacks human emotion), I simply don't agree that this is descriptive of the position I set forth, much less as defined by Pro: "beyond human reason and understanding". It is, in fact, descriptive of what is the intuitive position for most.Why is murder wrong?I am rather surprised my opponent asks this question without so much as acknowledging the explanation set forth in the previous rounds, which makes my opponent's position something of a straw-man. Murder is wrong, not because of the action (stabbing a guy), and not because of the consequences (he's dead), those consequences are immoral because they go against a deeper principle, the dignity and infinite value of the human person. This principle may well have a mystical foundation, as that of the Judeo-Christian tradition to which I hold, which bases itself on the idea that we are all made in the image and likeness of Godf, or a secular one, secular humanism among other philosophies uses different justifications for this, but they all hold to the general principle. To attack this axiom of moral thought is an attack on all human beings, to degrade the basis of our value is to degrade us all. Principles are not distant ideas for philosophers and tea rooms, they are practical as potatoes. Without them we do start to run into trouble. It is precisely this incapacity of grasping the general principle that leads Pro to the troublesome conclusion that to amputate a patient's leg or even to perform a surgery would involve committing intrinsically evil acts. I am rather surprised at his insistence because this is the same fallacious argument that was used when he claimed that under the view I proposed incarcerating someone would be immoral. Pain itself is not contrary to the dignity of a person. Pain and discomfort can be quite useful: it warns us when there is danger of further harm, in some circumstances it builds character when we learn to bear it, and in the case of operations and amputations, it can be necessary to grit our teeth and get through it in order to live another day. Torture, which inflicts pain either because the torturer takes a sadistic pleasure in causing it or to attain from the victim something he does not want to give (information or a confession, usually), is an attack on human dignity and therefore is an intrinsic evil.Kill a man to save a hundredPro sets forth a scenario in which one must alternatively choose between saving one life or a hundred or kill one man to save a hundred. As, in his view, the result is the same, he postulates the moral character of these situations is identical. This is not so. Without going into the idea of mediate and immediate collaboration or formal and material cooperation to which I pointed in round 2, the principles at play are quite obviously different. In the first case inaction (which is itself a moral choice) would lead to the deaths of 101 people. In this case the object, or means, is opening a door (with the knowledge we will not be able to open the other) and the intention to save the lives of the 100 people in the room. The means are not contrary to human dignity in such a way as to render them intrinsically evil, and so it is a moral choice. In the second case the object is the murder of the single person (let us call him Fred, or Annie, or Mother) who is of infinite dignity and value who cannot be quantified. This attack on innocent life is so contrary the fundamental principle of human dignity as to render the act intrinsically evil. The intention is identical (to save the life of the others), the action cannot be considered to be on the same moral grounding as the other.Let's leave the realm of the hypothetical and see where the difference between the morality of outcomes and, you know, actual morality becomes clear. In the 1940s, American researchers in Guatemala infected 1,300 prison inmates without their consent (and usually without their knowledge) with different venereal diseases, mostly syphilis in order to test the efficacy of penicillin. The results were inconclusive, but as we have seen, the researchers could not have known the end result, but only the potential for positive results. Their initial calculation of the ethical issues involved, from Pro's standpoint was impeccable. The end result would be as follows: somewhere over Guatemalan 1,000 inmates would contract syphilis, some would live what is expected in those who have these diseases and others may have their symptoms controlled or even be cured by the penicillin. In contrast millions of people all over the world would face better prospects when facing this disease, and the cure may even be found. Overall, more lives are affected positively by this experiment than negatively and this positive result excuses the wrong committed to attain it. The story broke in 2011 and caused moral outrage in the vast majority of the American population and all over the world. Not because they explicitly defend the moral framework I have set forth in this debate, but because it is simply what intuitive moral sense tells us. This investigation was so grave an attack on the dignity of the inmates whose rights were trampled on that it constituted an attack on all humanity, including those who stood to benefit from the findings of the investigation.ConclusionPro purports that his is an advanced moral philosophy. I must say that I am not sure what it is advancing towards, but a philosophy that can be used to defend the atrocities that it does (the case of Guatemala, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even the London Blitz or Stalin's purges, as long as we are able to sell the overall outcome as net-positive). Any attempt to build morality while ignoring moral principles as a basis for it are doomed to fall like any house with no firm foundations. Those "intrinsic" which he described as mystical and arbitrary are the firm ground which avoids making morality meaningless. They are a line I do not set. A line I must recognize and force myself to