Total Control (pro) is Better Than Free Will (con)

Thanks for the debate ASB. ==Competing Rights Claims== Morality is not as simple as my opponent would like to make it out to be. In the train example, there are three people on one track and one person on the other. One group is going to be hit by the train and die, which do you save? My opponent claims that under forced will, you would always be forced save the three people, even if the one person were your father. Firstly, I don't see how he reaches this conclusion based on his limited ethical framework. Secondly, what if the one person was the President of the United States and the three people were Osama bin Laden, a re-incarnated Adolph Hitler, and Glenn Beck? What if the one person was the second coming of Christ? What if the one person was a small child and the three people were all 90 years old? It's not clear that you should ALWAYS choose to save the three people, regardless of circumstances. Free will leads us to morality, when we have to confront the aporia of the undecidable and make a difficult decision. The fact that my opponent has to refer to an ethical framework that was created by free will proves the downfall of his ethical system. If an ethical dilemma arises that forced will cannot solve, we will need to resort to free will to solve it. ==Free will with a slight Caveat== My opponent never clearly answered: can we eat the steak under forced will or not? There are some people who claim that eating steak does not respect others or the environment because if we were all vegetarians, there would be plenty of food. So can we eat steak under forced will or will we all be forced to be vegetarians? ==Things that exist are better== My opponent's only real refutation is "do you prefer a real or imaginary death." This is a false dichotomy: you cannot choose an imaginary death because death IS real and immortality IS non-existent. The real dichotomy would be: do you prefer an existent life (with an inevitable death) or a non-existent life (where you can pretend you are immortal). My opponent says, "It has been proven that people can move before thought comes in." This is utterly false. If you move your arm, a brain scan will show activity in your motor cortex preceding the movement by fractions of a second. Free will obviously exists. If you have the ability to change your mind about something, you have free will. Obviously, free will, which actually exists, is better than forced will, which cannot exist unless there was an omniscient and omnipotent God, but I disproved this possibility. == A vast majority may not kill== My opponent says that many people don't follow the law, yet he argues for anarcho-communism? This is confusing. People are not incapable of following morality, but they sometimes don't agree on one moral system. Many people would not consider cheating on a stupid school assignment "immoral" if doing the project is a waste of time and would jeopardize grades and learning in more important classes. Many people would not consider all lying to be immoral – if your daughter asks you "daddy, don't I look pretty," and you don't think she does, I don't think it's the time to say, "sorry hunny, but that dress is really ugly." Most people consider white lies to be okay. Many people don't follow "the law" because they often don't agree with the laws, like the laws that banned sodomy or the laws against smoking marijuana. Now that my opponent has brought "the law" into forced will, I'm even more confused as to his advocacy. Who gets to set the rules that we are forced to follow? My opponent never answers this question adequately. He just repeats, "man can set the rules." Which man (or woman)? Whoever gets to write the rules that we are all forced to follow essentially has totalitarian control over the entire world. Also, most people respect the non-aggression axiom; they don't aggress against another's person or property. The reason is that most people agree that these actions are immoral. My opponent has no evidence that people are systematically incapable of following moral systems based on negative rights, and thus he never adequately proves that forced will is necessary and justifies sacrificing free will. ==Rothbard== Too bad the debate is over, but I challenge my opponent to give one example where the government has successfully intervened in the free market to prove his assertion that capitalism cannot exist without government. Somalia's huge increase in economic growth under anarchy disproves this assertion. ==Marx== His source says that Marx denied free will because he thought the Communist Revolution was "inevitable." My opponent's source isn't that credible. Marx believed that it was clear to anyone observing historical trends that workers would inevitably rise up and demand the fruits of their labor. That doesn't mean he denied that those workers had free will; he just believed that anyone with free will, who was denied the fruits of his labor for long enough, would eventually revolt. ==Social contract== My point here was merely that if my opponent wants to give up his free will, that is his right, since he has free will. But we must start with free will before we are given the option of giving in to forced will. My opponent himself proves this because he concedes that moral principles wouldn't exist without free will. ==Derrida== Derrida is not a nihilist – no evidence of this is provided. And it's irrelevant to Derrida's viewpoint that morality doesn't exist without free will. If humans are forced to follow "natural laws" of behavior, then when we act morally, it is no more meaningful than when a rock falls when dropped, since it is merely following a natural law. ==The Matrix== This wasn't intended as evidence, but as an entertaining side-note. CONCLUSION My opponent fails his burden of proof because he never answers adequately who gets to write "the rules" or why the ethical principles he chose at random off the internet are the correct and only ethical principles we need to follow. My opponent fails to explain how competing rights claims can be adjudicated without free will. My opponent fails to prove that total control is even possible, since he refuses to argue in favor of God (since that didn't work out for him in his last debate). My opponent argues only for partial control, saying we can do anything we like (e.g. eat steak) as long as it doesn't violate an ethical principle – this sounds a lot like free will. We have thoughts and desires in our minds and then our bodies are forced to follow those thoughts and desires – this sounds more like a biological description of how our bodies actually function in real life, rather than an argument in favor of "total control." Assuming my opponent had actually argued for total control, you should vote Con in today's debate because a world without free will is a world devoid of meaning. We would all be mindless automatons; puppets controlled by some puppet master. Totalitarian systems of control were always driven on fear – fear of the enemy, fear of economic collapse, fear of powerful minorities. My opponent's system is no different – totalitarian control of the mind based on fear of other humans and what they might do using their free will. Don't give in to this irrational fear. Vote Con. Thank you for reading.