There is no universal moral standard.

I appreciate the time he's put into his arguments, and the challenge that they have presented. As is customary in the debate formats I'm familiar with, I'll spend this last round on voting issues for our members. I'll be parsing the debate down into a few key arguments that I believe have proved my advocacy over my opponent's. 1. If you don't read any other voting issue, read this one. It was present in my overview in round 2, and it will be emphasized again since the negation failed to properly address it. I assert that prevalent moral standards, even those that are agreed upon by many countries, are not contrary in any way to my position that those standards are situationally created. Though my opponent attempts paint me as the indifferent, amoral being of the round, I need not be characterized as such. Use the UN's declaration of human rights as our example again, which was never addressed: it fits well within the relativist perspective in that it was ratified by a collection of countries who have agreed upon a set of rights for human beings. The negation never addresses the fact that these rights are not empirically universally accepted. Also, the negation fails to address a key turn I made against his advocacy at the end of the 2nd round: the UN, by even proposing a resolution laying out the rights of all human beings, realized that not every society in the world shared the same views on human rights. I'm sure that this resolution went through much subjective debate, and like any law or policy, was finely worded and tailored to attempt to meet the needs of the most countries simultaneously. This, in and of itself, proves that seemingly "universal" moral codes are the product of societal compromise, as each society didn't share the same conceptions of morality to begin with. 2. I believe my arguments regarding the tribes of sub-Saharan Africa to have been mishandled during this debate. The negation says that I'm either trying to paint war as a meaningless cultural artifact, or I am accidentally affirming a biological basis for moral standards by asserting that "universal laws are worse than no laws. " I never make either of these arguments. To the first, war is certainly not a random artifact. Prior to European invasion, war in Africa was the same as war anywhere else: resource-related or culture-related (for our purposes, religious motivation will be part of a given culture). However, these skirmishes never had the characteristics of the warring that occurred after European invasion of Africa. Once that invasion occurred, once Europe hegemonically divided and conquered tribes and restructured their entire way of life, we saw Rwanda, Uganda, Congo civil wars, Darfur, etc. , ad infinitum. It wasn't causeless or meaningless until one culture superimposed itself onto another, which is precisely what moral universalism seeks to do. To the second, my argument is that relative moral laws are better than universal law. I am not required to argue that relativism means we have no moral laws, nor that we can't count on certain ones within many different societies, as I've already asserted. We just can't count on having all the same moral laws within all societies, and that doing so or attempting to force all societies to do so will cause those sub-Saharan African harms I discuss throughout the debate. 3. My opponent holds moral standards and instincts to be equals. This is just plain untrue. I made this argument before, and I'll make it again: the only thing that distinguishes us from our other animal brethren is reason. This difference is crucial to the understanding of morality and how it is formed. We all have instincts. We all, as animals, from bed bugs to blue whales, genetically want for some sort of security, for example. That is not a moral standard. Non-rational animals have no moral standards. Mantises don't have them. Bears don't have them. Caribou don't have them. Why don't they have them? Because they can't intellectualize those instincts, weigh them in a given environment, and then choose to modify behavior to ignore that instinct. Or to meet the instinct halfway. They fulfill their genetic duties or they die. End of story. It isn't the same for humans. We have and we exercise so many more choices than the simplistic choices other animals make regarding instinctual behavior. The gun control example illustrates this: Canadians have chosen a completely different moral standard of security than the US. The instinct of security is shared, but the way of fulfilling that instinct, the behavior on the part of society, is entirely different based on the needs of that given society. The death penalty example also backs this up. The United States still legally and ethically supports the use of the death penalty as a state's right. All other first world nations disagree strenuously. Why is that? Why, if killing is universally bad, does the United States continue to allow its states to violate this universal moral standard? Because the standard isn't universal. Laws, codes, and standards, the rhetoric my opponent and I have mutually chosen for this debate, are all applications of something. Just as a federal statute is the application of a given majority belief within society, a moral statute is the application of a given majority belief within a society. Thank you, Roy, for the awesome debate! Enjoy the read, everyone.