Vigilantism *Official Tier Tournament: Round 1*

If this were true, I could have forfeited all my speeches then posted entirely new “responses” in my final round essentially blocking Pro from any chance to refute my arguments. This is blatantly unfair disproving Pro’s claim. Rebuttals are for weighing arguments, comparing cases, clarifying, and contrasting what has already been said. It is NOT for entirely novel responses. Pro’s final round is a novel response to my R2- you don’t need to consider it because in R1 we agreed to prohibit it. I must make new arguments this round to respond to Pro’s new arguments, but if you aren’t already ignoring everything Pro said in R4 you shouldn’t have a problem with this. There's no conduct point so ad hominem attacks don’t matter; if there was, I'd deserve it for Pro’s forfeit. Anyways I haven’t made an ad hom- claiming Pro is sniping with semantics is a critique of strategy not the individual. Honestly I think Pro knows I haven’t made any ad hominem arguments- he’s just throwing stuff against the wall hoping something sticks. The Resolution I’m going to spend a lot of time breaking down why Pro’s claims about the Resolution are terrible because without his skewed interpretation he has no way to win this debate. First, beyond the definitions agreed to in R1 Pro has no special right to dictate what the Resolution means. I am only bound to the Resolution and definitions presented when I accepted this debate. Once the debate has begun, if Pro and Con disagree about what the Resolution means, the judges need to resolve this disagreement by evaluating the case each side made for their understanding of the Resolution. This is the only way to resolve disputes as it is the only way that gives equal consideration to both sides of the debate. We can determine the best way to understand the Resolution by evaluating competing interpretations in terms of fairness and quality of discourse. Why should we care about fairness and quality of discourse? its a community norm and we’ve decided to care about it. We remove bad ballots and everyone reading this has probably been angry about some unfair thing that happened in a debate. They are preconditions for debate itself. By defending an unfair Resolution Pro has pronounced my position “unwinnable” and we have barely talked about vigilantism. Pro even says that everything he has has to say about vigilantism is irrelevant. When you throw fairness and quality of discourse out the window you prevent any debate from taking place. There are two reasons why we debate- for the fun of it or for its educational benefit. Fairness is the only way to keep debate fun and competitive, and protecting quality of discourse keeps debate both fun and educational. Pro’s interpretation is clearly unfair- he has made the Resolution so trivial as to be incontrovertible. Pro’s interpretation is also unfair because it isn’t an accurate reading of the Resolution. Any interpretation that is incompatible with a grammatical reading of the Resolution is unfair because such an interpretation is inaccessible to both parties of the debate. Definitions and grammar describe how language is publicly understood. I provided definitions in R2 showing how Pro’s reading doesn’t fit with the R1 definitions. Looking to standard definitions of “right” and “able” the Resolution reads: "The conduct of taking the law into one's own hands has sufficient power to be shown to be conforming to facts or truth or reasonable from a point of view concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct. " The straightforward interpretation of the Resolution is that Pro must show that morality is capable of showing the practices of vigilantism to be correct when the government fails to uphold the law. To show that morality is “able” to justify, he must show that morality actually does justify it! If he can’t show that morality DOES justify vigilantism, he hasn’t proven the Resolution. And justification requires the ability to be shown “right” - that’s straight from the R1 definitions! The “defensible” clause is at best a weighing mechanism for the degree of certainty Pro needs. But if my arguments for why morality doesn’t justify vigilantism are better than Pro’s, then he has certainly failed to show it to be defensible. If it were defensible, then his arguments would be better than mine. Pro may be right that you could call “any point of view that falls within the boundaries of a moral system” a “moral point of view,” but this is not the sense of the phrase the Resolution implies. Note that “moral point of view” doesn’t appear in the resolution- we need to take ALL the words of the resolution in context. Pro’s interpretation makes no sense with common usage. Just because people have made scientific arguments that the world is flat doesn’t mean that the claim “the world is flat” is scientifically justified. Finally, we can see that Pro’s interpretation is unfair and bad for discourse because it makes most of the Resolution irrelevant. To defend the clause “when the government has failed…” he must defend that all cases that meet this criteria are justified. Even under his bizarre interpretation he has still lost because there are cases where individual’s subjective morality will render vigilantism unjustifiable even when the government fails to uphold the law. Pro says even in the cases people COULD change their minds, but this is irrelevant. If there is case X where people don’t hold the required moral beliefs, then vigilantism is not justified in case X. It doesn’t matter that a hypothetical world exists where they do hold the needed beliefs. There may also be cases where people are incapable of changing their beliefs due to brainwashing or are extreme zealotry. Case1. "Subjectivism fails to justify ANY moral claim" Pro asserts that moral justification is subjective but ignores my argument. If the same justification can be used to make contradictory claims, it is not reasonable- it literally violates reason. My argument can be read as an explanation of what a justification is. A justification is something that shows a claim to be right. Intrinsic to the concept of justifiability is the idea that it allows us to rationally support some claim. If we do away with this idea, we dissolve all criteria of justifiability and render the word meaningless. A justification is not mere historic explanation- I don’t justify the claim “E=mc2” by explaining I saw it on a chalkboard. Pro’s response does exactly what I said it would- it collapses into total truth subjectivism. If you buy that all truth is subjective there isn’t any point reading this debate or evaluating arguments- Rise Up! Vote Con to affirm your ability to make the truth whatever you want! This is your one chance to vote Con and literally ANY RFD you give will be valid since Pro says truth is subjective. Pro says that moral claims are not “right or wrong. ” His definition of justify requires him to show that vigilantism is “right;” this statement shows that Pro fails to uphold the Resolution. I agree that musical taste is like morality- you can’t be right or wrong. That’s my whole case, that moral claims can’t be true or false and so cannot be justified. You can’t rationally justify your musical taste, you can’t build an argument that shows your taste to be reasonable. Taste is a non cognitive bias just like morality. You can’t “morally justify” something anymore than you can “musically justify something. ” 2) "Moral statements can't be justified because they can't be true or false" Pro completely misses my argument. In order for something to be “able to be shown to be right or reasonable” is must be CAPABLE of being right or reasonable. My argument is that morality is subjective but it is also non-rational and not capable of being right or wrong. This debate is about the truthfulness of moral statements, as the definition of justifiable requires that something be “able to be shown right. ” This wins me the debate even with Pro’s interpretation of the Rez. If moral claims are incapable of being right, then vigilantism is “not able” to be justified. Pro claims that I treat the term “justify” as if it stands alone, but really I just acknowledge that word is in the Resolution. Pro seems to think that saying “everything is subjective” wins him the debate. Putting the word “morally” in front of the word “justified” doesn’t change the core meaning of “justified. ” Any form of justification, be it legal or Biblical or moral, must still be concerned with what is right and the result of reason. Moreover, my R1 argument shows that moral claims by nature cannot be true or false. So we might say something is Biblically justified because claims made by the Bible can be used as justifications for other claims. But this can only be done because Biblical claims can be true or false, there are Biblical facts. We are fundamentally unable to treat morality this way because there are no moral facts, there is nothing true or false about moral claims, and so they are unable to justify or be justified. Pro ignores the possibility that morality may be both subjective AND unjustifiable, yet this is precisely what I argue. Nothing about subjectivity guarantees justifiability. In fact, I have argued that subjectivity guarantees justifiability. Subjective traits are bare facts we live with and maybe change if we feel like. I prefer apple pie to cherry pie- this preference is not justifiable because it is a subjective preference to which terms like “true,” false,” and “reasonable” do not apply. In the same way, morality is a reflection of or contingent normative biases. Morality cannot be justified, so vigilantism is not justified, so the Resolution fails.