[ADVANCED DEBATERS ONLY] This house believes in karma

regardless of whether or not utilitarianism is a valid philosophical framework, the point remains that you can maintain a system of morality without having the objective existence of morality, i.e.. assigning the moral values of "good" and "bad" to properties intrinsic to the idea of "action" the most obvious being consequence with the most well known philosophical framework being utilitarianism. the problems that con raises against utilitarianism is that: 1. That not all people are created equal and it is thus impossible to objectively determine everyones value. This is true, in that Timmy's loving mother probably believes her son to be infinitely more important than the president. But alas, this does not raise the utilitarianism breaking quandary that Con hoped it would. In a utilitarianism framework, it is all about utility or happiness, as one of the key philosophers of utilitarian ethics John Stuart Mill says: "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness (1)." As such if there is good reason to believe that the president would after saving him enact bills that would proceed to help millions of people, then it would be morally right to save him at the cost of five Timmy's 2. The second problem is that Con cites that it is not a good ethical system if you don't want to maximize pleasure, this objection is irrelevant as whether or not it is a good ethical system is not in question, but whether or not it is workable. which it is if you wish to maximize happiness. 3. Cons next two objections cite how quantification and prediction of consequences is impossible. Specifically citing the three mile island disaster, which was caused essentially by the negligence of the corporation running the plant, as such the people who made the types of decisions that brought about such negligence would be considered to have committed an immoral act regardless of the fact that it led to tighter nuclear regulation, as they didn't make the decisions they did foreseeing that it would create tighter nuclear policy in America. Utilitarianism cites this immorality because of the Doctrine of Negative Responsibility (1). Which states that we are only responsible for those consequences which could be foreseen and are responsible for the negligence in this regard. Besides the last point, Quantification of happiness need not be exact, only to the point in which the moral agent would be satisfied in the morality of his actions. Also Karma need not necessarily care about the knowledge of morality only that the morality exists with the action. As I've said, the morality need not have its own objective existence but could be determined by something intrinsic to the existence of an action, or it could even be something arbitrary, I do not pretend to know whether cosmic forces exist or how they work, only that they can work regardless of the moral system it is based upon. To work, Karma need only a few things, some kind of scale as to whether actions are "moral" or "immoral" and some sort of consequence that is caused by those actions whether directly or indirectly 1. http://www.csus.edu...