Human life should be preserved as much as possible

In Round three Pro has addressed the details of each of my examples, but not the point each was making. However, even to the extent they were addressed, they were not truly challenged. Key details were changed or omitted which caused the efforts at refutation to fail. This round will consist of addressing each of these attempts in some depth and affirming the ways in which my arguments demonstrate a reasonable belief standard to be superior to an absolute knowledge standard in matters of ending life to preserve greater amounts of human life. Lifeboat argument. The point of this hypothetical scenario is to show that relying on an absolute knowledge standard can lead to loss of life rather than the preservation of life. This happens when you act to preserve life in the short term by increasing a greater future risk to life. When the increments of that risk increase are unknown or unknowable, the absolute knowledge standard means that you must preserve life in the short term until any further increase is certain to cause great loss of life. By stopping at that point, of moving from great likelihood to certainty, you have still created a situation where there is a great likelihood that your actions will cause the greater loss of life. This principle was illustrated in the lifeboat example. If you are not absolutely sure that pulling another swimmer into the boat will lead to everyone's death, you must do it. However, before you reach that point, you will have overloaded the boat to the point that the likelihood of it swamping and ending everyone's life has become very likely. Pro's response to this is to deny that the risk increase increment is unknown, and that it is a simple matter of physics to determine whether pulling another person into the boat is safe or not. This approach does not work for the following three reasons: 1. The proposed ability to analyze risk is unrealistic in this scenario. Lifeboats are not considered safe when loaded with ("allowed a capacity" of) a number of people beyond which they where tested for [1]. This is because safety considerations go beyond weight displacement affecting how low in the water the boat rides, and includes structural integrity, balance, and ability to handle rough weather. Including more people than the safety guidelines allow would "risk disaster" [2] if a storm came up. Even without a storm, an overcrowded small boat of Haitian refugees had to be rescued when their overcrowded boat began to teeter on the verge of overturning before being rescued by a passing coast guard vessel [3]. Please note that there is a picture on the accompanying link that shows more than a foot of the hull of the endangered vessel was above water, emphasizing that Pro's safety analysis was incomplete. I find it insufficiently supported that the members of our hypothetical lifeboat would be able to weigh all the relevant factors and come up with an exact analysis of incremental risk per swimmer picked up so that they could reach near-absolute knowledge of acceptable risk. Since the only objection Pro raised is that the lifeboat users would be capable of such a feat of analysis, my argument stands. A reasonable belief standard allows for the preservation of life of the members of the lifeboat crew, while the absolute knowledge standard would force them to overburden their craft until disaster was imminent, imperiling both their own lives and those they attempted to save. 2. Pro's argument is implicitly self-defeating. By creating clearcut situations where water is inches from the top of the boat and situations where water is a foot from the top of the boat, Pro implicitly accepts that there is a grey area in between those water levels where the risk cannot be accurately assessed. While I disagree as to where even those brightlines, should be, the acceptable of the grey area is all that is needed to defend my argument. 3. Pro does not address the underlying principle summed up at the end of last round and expressed in more detail here. While she still has the opportunity to do so, given that it is only now being fully fleshed out, she will need to for her objections to move beyond nitpicking the hypothetical. Domestic Abuse: The domestic abuse scenario involved a scenario where the abuser was attacking a woman with a capacity to defend herself by killing him. The majority of Pro's response did not address this scenario. Only one line did: "If you choose to defend yourself, your only legal protection is if you kill in self defense during an actual attack, which poses more risks as in the heat of the moment, he may end up getting the gun." This is unsourced, does not allow for the fact that their are other means of self-defense than firearms, and does not allow for a situation where a woman would be able to apply lethal self-defense successfully. It also does not address the underlying point that there are situations that absolute knowledge is a standard often unobtainable, at least within a relevant time frame, and that immediate threats require an individual to use the reasonable belief standard. I also note that Pro is introducing extraneous impacts that are irrelevant to the debate. Legal consequences such as jail time are irrelevant as the only criteria we are using is whether life preservation is maximized. Poland: The point is to look at large scale application of the standard, which emphasizes the point made in the domestic abuse example about immediacy and further develops the idea that working with the best reasoning and information available is better than striving for knowledge we cannot obtain. Pro uses a similar approach to this example as in the lifeboat example. She suggests that we can somehow determine how many lives would be lost by going to war versus not going to war, within a margin of error that still allows accuracy. This assertion is unsupported and should be dismissed. Pro also makes an unsupported assertion that we should only apply the calculus to individual actions within the war and an unsupported assertion that we can be sure of which of those smaller actions will preserve the most life. The insufficiency of the argumentation is shown most clearly when Pro admits that "even then, we don't know how many troops are going to fall to take a town." If you don't know how many people will die during a given action, then it's impossible to come close to absolute knowledge about if that unknown number is greater or less than a second, equally unknown number. My point stands. Hitler was poised to invade Poland. If Britain and France had used a reasonable belief standard, they could have struck earlier and prevented the German blitzkrieg from gaining momentum, ending the war sooner and saving more lives. This was a reasonable belief at the time. Churchill saw this and promoted it, knowing that ceding Czechoslovakia was only giving Hitler time, confidence, and domestic support [4]. If they had used an absolute knowledge standard, they might never have acted. There is also the issue of the Holocaust. The American and British governments had enough information to know that Birkenau and Auschwitz were death camps. Had they acted under a reasonable belief standard, they could have bombed the rail lines leading to the camps and disrupted their operations, saving millions of lives [5,6]. However, they information they had was not "complete, nor wholly accurate [7]" meaning that they could not have acted were they to to operate under an absolute knowledge standard. Summary: I do not believe that Pro has substantially addressed the relevant issues raised in my arguments nor expanded at all on the virtues of her own standard. At this time the balance of argumentation favors reasonable belief over absolute knowledge as a standard for maximizing the preservation of life. Cites in Comments