Morality is subjective

Thanks for the complement Pro. I also agree that this debate has started off well and I appreciate the lack of animosity that can sometimes be found in these debates. My opponent starts off their round by claiming that the "moral compass that has been around for thousands of years where the ideas of murder being immoral comes from, this moral compass did not always exist." That is an interesting claim to make. The problem is that it isn't really supported. When exactly did the moral law come into existence from my opponent's point of view? Are they saying that objective morality exists now but it didn't at some time in the past? Then my opponent claims that "we cannot know what is absolutely wrong or absolutely right, only what our society deems as absolutely wrong or absolutely right." I am confused. We can't know right/wrong but societies can? Aren't people the ones who make up societies? Doesn't that mean that we do actually know right/wrong in order for the societies to know right/wrong? If our society were to legalize murder, would that be absolutely right since societies determine what is right/wrong according to my opponent's worldview? Then my opponent says that "The ancient Romans famously slaughtered many innocent in the colosseums for sport. They needed no excuse when they threw ancient Christians into a pit with a lion in it. Were these people insane? No, they were not. How could this group of people see, tolerate, and even encourage such an unjust act? The answer is simple: their society had different morals than ours does today." The Christians were a completely different people that came about in the Roman time period. They refused to worship Roman Gods, they refused to watch families leave their unwanted children in the forest to die (they took them in themselves), and they were willing to die for their cause. Their beliefs went against the Romans and that made them angry (to say the least). In this specific case, these people knew what they were doing was wrong. How do I know this? Well, the Romans eventually put a stop to this persecution. The reason for their bad behavior isn't that they had different morals, the answer is that they knew the moral law and did bad things anyway. I understand that it can be temping to just say that people have different morals. But when we do that, we take away moral responsibilities and no one is accountable for their actions. My opponent then states that "Animals have no moral compass, and provided we evolved from animals, we have no moral compass." I actually partly agree with my opponent here. Animals do not have morality, but humans certainly do. One of evolution's biggest problems is that it cannot account for the existence of objective morality. My opponent then says that "We humans have created one so there can be order within a society. This morality has been so ingrained in our minds over generations and generations of belief that there is no need to question it in our modern society." Let me get this straight, at some random point in the past, humans created a moral standard and it just so happened that all of their subjective opinions happened to agree with each other? My opponent states that "We know that Hitler was utterly wrong because our society's morals see him as wrong. If things had gone differently, and Germany won the war, we could very possibly be living in a world where all of Hitler's actions were seen as right." Really? I find it interesting that there were Nazi's that recognized that they did wrong (http://www.mcclatchydc.com...). I also have family that lives in Germany that do not think the Holocaust was moral. "We still see people who believe that what Hitler did was right, however, they are a fringe group, since most of our society agrees that what Hitler did was wrong." I can't think of a single person that would say that Hitler was right that isn't mentally insane. But my point is that all societies recognize that Hitler was wrong (even Germany). "I have been brought up in a society that tells me that Hitler's actions were wrong, but if I were brought up in a society that taught me that Hitler's actions were right, I would end up believing them." This commits the genetic fallacy. While it is true that our societies beliefs do have an affect on us humans, we still learn to think for ourselves. That is why people raised in Christian households don't always remain Christian, that is why societies that commit horrible things later admit they were wrong, and that is why no society today would condone what Hitler did. In other words, the society we grow up in does not force us to believe their standard of right/wrong.