Morality is objective.

It's been a lot of fun. In this round I'll try and give everyone a short summary of the debate as I see it. My CaseThe question "is morality objective? " (not the "principles of morality" as pro sneakily tried to change his burden to last round - morality itself is principles) is deceptively simple. It leads us on to two related questions - first, "what is morality? ", and second, "how can we test for objectivity? " (questions that pro also sneakily tried to claim this debate is not about - which is ironic, because pro dedicated whole paragraphs to answering these questions in the debate). My case was that, when faced with a moral question, one cannot test for objectivity. Pro has done very little to challenge this, and both of the arguments he did use I dealt with in round three. As a result, to make a moral judgement, one needs to use one's personal opinion, just as people form personal opinions on coming across a bay/lake for the first time as to its nature. In absence of an objective truth, we can only have a subjective opinion. What is morality? Morality was defined by pro as being principles concerning right/wrong. These principles are not things we know, but things we believe. I proved that truth is determined by exclusion of the alternative. If the alternative cannot be excluded, there is no objectively-right answer. Morality is a construct, built of our collective morals as a society. It's not some mystical set of principles written in stone on the other side of the sun - morality is what we believe (as opposed to know) it is. And if our principles are not objective, because we cannot objectively test them, then of course our morality is not objective as well. That's important. Let me adjust the definition slightly. Say morality was the principles we have concerning the Earth's orbit (and pretend we couldn't prove either way), or the principles concerning the existance of God. Regardless of whether or not God actually exists, or the Earth is standing still, if we cannot objectively test the answers then our principles are not dependant on some test, not dependant on what's actually true, and not in any way objective - they are dependant - solely dependant - on our subjective personal opinion. I'm not saying God both does and does not exist. I'm saying our religious principles are subjective, just as our principles concerning right/wrong must be subjective. Is a belief subjective if it's not objective? There's really nothing more I can say to this other than that I'm right by both my analysis in round two and by the very definition of objective and subjective. Finally, to claim that I really have no argument at all is quite preposterous - all pro attempts to prove is that my argument is irrelevant, not non-existant. The only problem is that it's not. Pro's CasePro needed four steps to make his argument, providing a nice framework to take them down. P1: Since I've spent more time rebutting this than any other of pro's contentions, I don't think it's true that "Con seems to concede I've defended this premise sufficiently". Opposites are not necessarily inverted statements, but simply anything exclusive. You can't both treat others as you'd like to be treated and treat them as you feel they deserve, because often we feel people deserve death, and most of us don't want to be murdered. This was just one of two counter-arguments I raised last round. The second, dropped by pro, is that moral rules cannot be rationalised. I do feel it deserved some response after two paragraphs of analysis. P2: I agreed with this one. Was a bit of a tautology after all. P3: Basically pro's only counter-refutation to my analysis is to call everyone with a different morality to pro "strange, insufficient, and irrelevant" in terms of their morality. Then he goes on to say the equivalent of "Also, some actions are amoral, and anyone who thinks otherwise" . .. Oh yeah, I forgot sociopaths are not relevant to this debate! I wrote that with sarcasm by the way. I encourage voters to read what I said about this in round three. Besides, I thought morality WASN'T supposed to be dependant on your personal opinion, pro? P4: I'm using concerned only in the sense of "to relate to" - even if I was a robot for the sole purpose of winning this debate, completely related to this debate in every way, it still does not follow that I am text-based. A maths textbook may be completely concerned with maths, using no asides or random interesting facts along the way, and yet still not be as objective as maths ("I think 2+2 is 9 but I might be wrong" would be an example of such a textbook). My examples only serve to illustrate the fallacy my opponent has committed - that is, assigning attributes to something related to, not equivalent to, another thing, as I said in round 2. In this light I've always been using the same definition, and pro has never rebutted my point. It's my opponent that's been meddling with equivocation, not me. ConclusionMy opponent has failed to engage with me on most of his points. He spent round three rebutting P2 which I had never contested, and in round four he only rebutted P3 with reference to an argument I had already rebutted. He dropped half of my arguments on P1 and failed to justify the other half. And he never rebutted P4, despite several attempts, none of which actually related to my argument. My case has been quite consistant. Morality is subjective because it depends on our personal opinion. We must depend on that because there is no "right" answer with morality - we can't see the future, so either alternative may be right. Pro's only real answer to this was to argue that just because we don't know the answer doesn't mean it isn't objective. But morality isn't the future, which has an objective outcome, but rather our beliefs about it, and how our actions today can affect the world we live in tommorrow. And that, folks, is why I think I've won the debate.