Objectivism is a valid ethical system.

Before addressing any of my opponent's particular augments, I first have to say that his overview of Objectivism in his first paragraph was on-the-money, and expanded an important point that may not have had a fully explicit explanation in my previous round - that morality is only applicable when there is an alternative. A system of ethics (where ethics is defined as the study of what an individual should do or how he should act) cannot work in a void. It presupposes that there is a choice to be made, since it is impossible to choose how to act where you are only able to take one course of action. It cannot be applied in a situation where there is nothing to choose. This is why morality cannot be applied to anything other than life - in a state of death, no choices can be made and no actions can be acted out. I think that there is a distinction to be made between an individual giving approval of X, and having X be desirable to that individual. As my opponent goes on, he says that something is only of value because an individual says it is, and no further justification is needed. An example of the wrongness of this statement can be found in a man who thinks that he can fly, and, as such, jumps off a bridge. Just because he "gave approval" to suicide does not mean that suicide was truly valuable to him - just because of the very nature of value, it is known that death cannot be valuable, since ethics cannot apply in death. The fact that death cannot logically be said to be a value reveals something incredibly important - that some things are not valuable, and, by extension, some things are valuable (i.e.. those that keep the individual away from that which is not valuable), and there exists some way to judge whether something is valuable or not. As said in my previous round, this standard can only logically be life, so that which is the good furthers the life of the individual, and that which is bad destroys it. If this objective standard is in place, it cannot be argued that, because some people judge certain songs or whatever else differently, morality is subjective - this ignores that the standard is still in place, no matter the individual's preferences. An individual might like painting more than engineering -this is still an objective judgement, because the individual is constricted into choosing that which aligns with their individual personality, genetics, etc. A weak child could either choose to be a writer or a mathematician - he could not rightfully choose to fight in a cage with a lion. There still exists a distinction between life and death, no matter how many individual paths to each there are. In every choice, the objective standard of morality is still implicitly lying. This means that individuals can have different values from one another, but each is still bound by the overarching standard. Any man can choose what fits him best in the range of the "good", but, if he chose something in the range of the "evil", he would be spitting in the face of ethics as a whole. My opponent then goes on to claim that, because you would have to be alive to do both those things which Objectivism claims are of value and those which are not, you cannot say that life is an end in itself. He says that experiences within life have to be evaluated in order to claim whether the life itself is good or bad, and, as such, this means that life is not an end in itself. This, I feel, ignores a crucial idea - that those immoral actions, by definition, can only serve to go against life. You need to be alive in order to drink, but the end result is death via liver failure. You need to be alive to smoke, but the end result is death via lung cancer. You need to be alive in order to put a gun to your head, but the end result is the same as that of all the previously listed actions: death. The only way to stay alive is to perform acts that help you stay alive - anything else would be a contradiction in terms. As such, the only reason why any person is able to stay alive is the moral acts they commit - a gambler who throws away fortunes does not profit enough via gambling to stay alive. He gains no value from gambling - gambling, in no way, helps him stay alive. It is only the acts of finding food to eat, water to drink, etc., that keep him alive - if he was totally immoral, he would be dead within the span of a minute. If that which is immoral is that which destroys life, even more immoral than inactivity is acting directly to hurt oneself. In this sense, the only possible end to the road of immorality is death.In other words, any immoral action can only be taken in spite of life, and in direct conflict with whatever moral actions the individual has also taken. It does not matter that it requires life - what matters is that it actively acts to achieve a state in which any value judgements become impossible. In this way, it is a contradiction in terms - if drinking was said to be good, the question of why must be asked. Drinking leads directly to death - and it is illogical to ascribe value to that which acts only to destroy value. It can act no other way, so how would it itself be valuable? It's almost like burning a forest in order to increase the number of trees in a given area.My opponent says that "only existence with a specific content can be evaluated as good or bad, therefore the idea of existence as an ‘end in itself’ is incoherent", but he ignores the fact that the only way to evaluate that existence is via a standard, and any attempt to go about it otherwise is impossible. The only logical standard is life itself. In the same way, the claim that you cannot justify justifications of what justifications are because doing so would be circular doesn't recognize the fact that that statement is, in itself, illogical - no absolute statement can be made without implicitly having a standard by which to justify it, and, if this is true, the statement itself disproves what it claims. It is a bit like saying the following: "no words exist" - it is self-defeating because it, by virtue of being said or thought, already assumes that the negation is true. If it is said, then, that that statement is illogical, then there must be a standard by which to justify statements, and, like in other cases, that standard is that thing which is at the base of all other thought - life. I hope I've made sense here, it's a bit difficult for me to write about these abstract things without getting carried away, hahah. I'm really enjoying this debate, and I really can't wait for what my opponent is going to throw at me next :)