Resolved: Individuals have a moral obligation to assist those in need.

My opponent claims that assisting someone is not always morally right but in the situation she claims is a disprover of assisting someone. There are three main attacks on the example used. One, the person is not in need. It is never claimed that the person needs the lunch money to survive or even needs it for a specific goal, while they may not be able to take the lunch money without assistance it is never implied they need the money anyway. The second problem is that the person is not assisting or allieving the suffering rather that instead of assisting and taking away the need they are contributing to the need instead of assisting the person. The proper way to assist said person is to give them lunch money. The third reason it forgets that part of the criteria as provided in my first argument for a person's suffering is that not assisting provides morally reprehensible concequences because the premise of not assisting can only be proven if the opposite is true,(or that the action truely is assisting). I would like to thank my opponent to conceding to the Value Criteron and premise which means that she concides that we can reach duty through morality. She seems to think that she refutes this but I think she misunderstands the purpose of VC and VP. This is understandable considering she has never done LD so I hope she stops arguing a moot point that she seems not to understand. "If it is impossible to say what one OUGHT to do based on what IS, then we have absolutely no reason to accept the resolution. The resolution says that we OUGHT to help one who IS in need." Incorrect, I think Hume addresses this quite clearly. What it means is that If one were to say that individuals are selfish and this is basis for all being selfish then this is a fallacy. It would be a fallacy if I were to claim that people are in need therefore we are obligated to assist them but I never claim this I only claim that we have a duty to assist them and that our duty must be the reason we do this. I think my opponent misunderstands Kants theory because what Kant specifically says is, and I negate my opponents source in favor of Stanford's Online Encloypedia of Philosophy, he claims that we can reach only the catorgorial imperitive through reason and never bases the ought/is it is rather whether an actions premise is right(helping someone in need) not on the concequences. I think my opponent misunderstands the is/ought problem. It is only about deriving an ought from a is. For example if a is is presented asking ourselves what should be? Based on that information alone it is a failure, but because we have rationalness we can determine if it is right but we cannot derive from being that something is inherantly right or in other words, ourselves being rational doesn't conclude that helping someone is morally right we must use rationality to determine if it is morally right. My opponent next short part claims that because someone is need we can derive whether we should help them or not but this is false and contirdictary to Kants theory. We must help because it is our obligation to. Not because our rationality tells us too. But if my opponent were to argue they are the same then she concedes the point. I apologize if you took this offensively one. How is an animal which as you described inherently egotistic(which still violates the Naturalistic fallacy) going to benefit from staving clearing the premise of starving benefitial to the organism. Choosing what you wanted to do(starve) is not equal to surviving. Thsis is a violation of Egotistic ethics. In fact egotism runs it self to the ground. But lets refute her out rages claim that I am not allowed to use more than one theory to prove my case. She is essentialy claiming that if two theories claim something is wrong even though they are not compatible this makes the entire claim wrong but this is similar to saying one argument is better than two. So I reserve the right to use multiple arguments in my case. "He says being selfless is in our self-interest. Therefore, he agrees with my proposal of doing what is in our self-interest (without infringing on another's rights and subsequent happiness)." The claim is made, but if you don't refute this point than you agree that selflessness is the correct policy and then as the resoltion states Individuals do have a moral obligation, the only difference is that you arguing that we do because of our self intreast we are required to. Also my opponent seems to be arguing Egoism rather than Objectivism. But Objectivism, as Ayn Rand says it requires that individuals assist people in need. If you read her book The Virtue of Selfishness, you will find that this is required. In fact Ayn Rand as philosopher(if it is even ok to claims this) primarly focused her Objectivism on political philosophy so even if you were to claim this works, it clearly wasn't intended to. It should be mentioned in the second round my opponent clearly states she is a moral realist but I thought this was her position she would be arguing by "objectivist meta-ethical standard " I thought she meant a that Moral Realism was a objective moral realist. SO I will break objectivism.(http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com...) "So, what did Rand mean by "selfishness"? In her view, the term refers to a particular form of rational egoism, "To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-esteem" (from The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, 1989). Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991) further clarifies: "[Objectivism aims at] the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action." All right, I'm all in favor of reason, and I certainly think that we need to give purpose to our lives in order to be more than just biological reproductive machines and I suppose self-esteem is broadly speaking a good thing (though too much of it leads to unbearable degrees of pompous self-importance). But for these to be the "supreme values" of one's life seems to be a stretch and to neglect other important aspects of human existence. What about, for instance, love and friendship? I suspect that they don't make the pantheon of Objectivist ethics because in some form or other they would conflict with rational self-interest." Also it should be mentioned that Objectvism(rational egoism) was a direct cause of the Roman Empire fell was due to(as we see in America) the rich having all the money and using that money to better themselves. Even if my opponent were to prove that objectivism is the meta-ethicly the correct philosophy, I have shown and my opponent seems to affirm that being selfless(assisting?) is in ones rational self-intreast therefore there can be no vote but Affirmative today.