It is morrally permissable to kill one innocent person in order to save the lives of other......

Acting in the situation of the resolution, allows everyone to walk away from the situation innocent, except the actor. A trolley has run out of control and is speeding toward the end of the track where it will then kill all 3 passengers. There is an innocent bystander whom happens to be severely overweight (which you intend to push onto the tracks), you think he will have enough weight to stop the trolley thus saving 3 innocent lives, however you will be killing him. If you hurl yourself in front of the trolley it will simply tear you apart because you do not weigh enough. Is it ok to push this man in front of the trolley? Of course it isn't! Why, one might ask. Simply due to the fact that you would be attempting to take the life of an innocent bystander just to make up for the BAD LUCK of the few. Put it this way, would you like it if he turned around and pushed you onto the tracks of the trolley? No you would not, but why? Because he would be attempting to steal your life without consulting you about it to make sure it is ok. It is funny how people will allow for someone else to be pushed or even push the someone else themselves, but if the tides are flipped and they are the one being pushed, it suddenly becomes wrong unjust and immoral. It is because of these previous words that I cannot concur with the following. Resolved "It is morally permissible to kill one innocent person in order to save the lives of more innocent people." My value is that of morality. Morality being defined as the concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct. My Value criterion will therefore be that of De ontology. This is best defined as, is an approach to ethics that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions. Now, in LD debate your value criterion is suppose to support your value. For instance, you know your value is there when your value criterion is present. Keeping that in mind, lets move to my opponents Value and Value criterion. His value is that of moral permissibility and his value criterion is that of moral proportionality. This stands the test of seeing if one upholds the other, however he is under false pretenses. He says the consequences are either, "kill or condemn to death." He is under the misconceived notion that if you do nothing you are condemning the people to death. My opponent is using a conjugation of the word "condemn" in order to put the weight of the deaths on the shoulder of the person who witnesses the horrifying event. I'd like to point out that in NO WAY is this person under fault. He did not put the few people in the position to lose their lives, so he is not the one responsible. Under his statements, he is saying that every citizen is obligated by morals to be a super hero or else you are directly responsible for any bad outcome. It is not wrong to witness a crime, ESPECIALLY if you were not the one who put the person into harms way. Within his first contention my opponent attempts to justify his actions with utility. But fails to realize, Utilitarianism will only work if you take individual rights into consideration, in fact, every instance when utilitarianism is wrong is when it DOESN'T take individual rights into consideration. In other words, it is ok to accept utility if with going by the majority vote, nothing bad happens to the minority. Hitler attempted to get rid of the Jews because he felt as if it would better his community. Although the betterment of society is a great value to hold, and the betterment of society would be better for the majority of Germany (the non-Jew population being larger than the Jew population), you can easily see this is inherently flawed due to the fact of horrible treatment of the innocent Jews. You cannot have 10 wolves and 3 sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Which is exactly what is happening here. This is where DEONTOLOGY comes into play. Looking at the actions themselves (like my opponent has said) it is INACTION VS MURDER. Is it hard to pick the more evil of the two? My opponent mentioned that you have the right to life and by inaction you are violating that right. he is right in one aspect of this sentence, you do have the right to life. However, the only way to violate this right is to kill. Seeing as how witnessing someone's death without being the person responsible for killing the person, isn't killing. The only way you're violating this right is if you affirm the resolution which is what you're doing. =================================Bottom line is================================== ---To know if something is morally permissible or not, you must first understand what morals are. My opponent is confused as to what MORALS actually are. When evaluating morality in an action, morals are based off of good and bad BEHAVIOR. The behavior present in the resolution is either Kill someone, or refuse to kill someone. In seeing this, you realize it is not morally permissible by this criteria. In the situation of the resolution, it is impossible to determine if actions are moral or not by knowing what the consequences are because knowing the future is NOT present nor possible for the person in the actual situation. All he can do is merely speculate what could/should/would happen. The resolution isn't saying if you do this, this will happen. It's more so giving a motive for a crime. Saying, you are doing this...for this (You are killing in order to try to save). It is impossible to prove that you will WITHOUT A DOUBT save those people's lives. For example, Life guards are there TO save.... Surgeons are there TO save.... Policemen are there TO protect and save. But this doesn't mean they will necessarily save you ever time. But that they will TRY to save you. This said[...] You see that if you kill this person, it's possible for the others to not be saved! Leaving you stuck with ALL negatives in the situation. On the other hand, if you do nothing, EVERYTIME, the innocent bystander will always survive. I sit and wait anxiously for your reply