The Most Reliable Basis For Determining Morality Is Via Secular Means

As Pro, I'm willing to take my time and definitively prove my argument. I'm going to skip right ahead to what Con ends up talking about: Re: There is no good or bad in secular ethics. The first line of attack Con uses is to appeal to 9/11, and ask us how we can know a moral claim surrounding it can be true. Excellent question. What isn't so excellent is Con then going to assert that "nothing about morality is [reliable]". This is plainly not true. And in order to demonstrate this, I'm going to use a considerably more basic example that was used excellently by Matt Dillahunty in his "The Superiority of Secular Morality" lecture (1), and that is of speed limits. In the Bible, or in any other ancient religious text, there aren't any rules anywhere saying that someone can"t drive at 100 miles per hour on the road outside my house. No theistic morality of any "Holy Books" even remotely implies that that is IMMORAL, but evidently some other process of morality clearly did realise that it was immoral, because we do know that it"s RISKY. We have concluded, reasonably, that barring exceptional circumstances, in order to reduce the risk of harm, the driving rights are therefore restricted to a speed where there's less risk, like 30-40mph. This is morality derived from being REASONABLE. Reasonableness is not based on God nor meaningless speculations of "What if? " " but on assessing rational considerations of evidence with respect to reality. Here"s the crux: we know that harm is a physical fact of the universe, and so morals don't require theological perspectives and we need not be constricted to just guessing and hoping for the best. I don"t require theology nor do I need to just guess in order to recognise that when balancing different options: we prefer life to death, and we prefer health to sickness, and so on. Those are the foundations upon which we build morality, ergo, secular-minded morality ultimately tends to be more than reliable enough. Con also asserts that you can't prove 9/11 caused more benefit or harm? Really? I mean sure, it did mean more people became aware of what terrorists were willing to resort to and it did create something like an improvement in air security, but what about other factors (2)? There was a huge rise in obnoxiously nationalist attitudes, not to mention a whole bunch of "revenge crimes" getting committed against any people who "looked" Middle Eastern. We had that ridiculous outcry and hate campaigns directed against the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque". Don't tell me that 9/11 hasn't also been a big contributing cause in the rising level of economic hardship people now face, and let's not also forget the really messed up health issues people ended up suffering from. And even if Con COULD somehow prove that we can't demonstrate whether there was more harm than good, he'd still have to demonstrate that the ends would even remotely justify the means. Con also brings up the example of "killing", and points out numerous examples of topics that fall under such a category, and then proceeds to point out that stuff is "context-dependant . .. the world is always changing as time goes on, moral values of individual actions change as well". Sure, I guess, but Con doesn't seem to realise that secular morality figured this sort of stuff out ages ago (1) (3). Con also then talks about "some good and some bad" consequences. Look, yes, nothing is intrinsically "right" or "wrong" but, at the same time, moral evaluations can be made with respect to values and without spiraling into moral relativism. Just as we can objectively evaluate physical health by comparing one's state to an ideal or norm (which may change) and we can objectively evaluate a chess position with respect to the goals, we can objectively evaluate moral questions with respect to values. What about the values? Well when Con goes on to talk about two different sets of people and what they would have gained from 9/11, Con staggeringly fails to grasp the devastatingly simple values of compassion and empathy, where people comprehend that their own pleasure and pain are just like those experienced by others. Most of us don't like . Would the tycoons have liked to be in those towers at the time? You can bet they wouldn't. And what about those who were in the towers? If we could go back in time and put them in the shoes of the tycoons, would they embrace those roles and look to exploit the tragedy? Maybe, as Con implies, some of those hypothetical people could be every bit as immoral as those hypothetical tycoons, but then we have a word for such people, and it's called "sociopaths". Maybe you would consider such a label harsh, but I'm pretty sure those victims of 9/11 would feel empathy and compassion for those victims and wouldn't want to exploit them. It's all very well imagining a potential "Day After Tomorrow" or "2012" scenario, but until that kind of thing happens, all we have to work with is the here and now. And the here and now dictates that we look to the history of humanity in not only deciding what is moral, but why we would think that. This removes any external factors like the baseless "What If? " scenarios, and allows us to make our own informed decisions, with an end result that provides the best ethical results. Score one for secularism in this round. Re: The value of a moral claim in religious morality is contingent on the existence of God. I would propose a correction to Con's claim that religious morality is contingent on the "existence" of God, and say it's more to do with a "belief", since the existence has never been proved, but Con gives no basis for his claim humans would be better off in heaven (after all, if God is a tyrant and anyone who repents gets to be with him, would you REALLY want to live there? ) and repeats the baseless claim that secular folks can't verify their moral claims, as illustrated by what I wrote above. Re: Moral systems give absolute answers to relative questions Con completely ignores the point I made at the end of Round 2 which gave ten topics that could be subjects for "tosses of the coin", and how, as I pointed out, I am pretty sure many people would hate to live in those societies were, for example, torture, rape, child abuse, and persecution based on certain characteristics are considered socially acceptable. Con's failure to answer this demonstrates that irrespective of what his sources say, the fact remains that when one actually carefully considers whether we should or should not engage in the above negative things, there's only one winner. Con's "chimp" link even contains a phrase that contradicts his argument, where the group that does better than it is ironically the one that applies more rational and wider analytical thought, exactly in line with what secular thinking entails. Moreover, secularism never claims to be perfect, and nor does this debate title. It claims only that it is the "Most Reliable Basis". The rest of what Con writes is something that's again already refuted above as to how secular morality really justifies our moral decisions. I'll leave you with a video by Christina Rad, called "The Objective Of Morality", and while I consider what she talks about to be more of a "shared reliable subjective morality" than an "objective morality" (which I'll explain my objection to in the next round), she still reiterates a good deal of my main points plus some other very good points. . http://www.youtube.com... Sources (1) . http://blip.tv... (2) . http://en.wikipedia.org... (3) . http://wiki.ironchariots.org...