This house believes ethical egoism is false

His argument is one that supposes verificationism – the idea that, for anything to be true, it must be empirically verifiable. Or, in the negative, “all statements which are not empirically verifiable…can be neither true nor false” (to quote YYW) and are meaningless. Whether this is an uncharitable definition of the word “false” from the resolution I shall leave to those voting, but I shall present a series of arguments against the verification principle in its application to this ethical debate. Firstly, I shall use the Frege-Geach problem to highlight how intuitively verificaitonism is wrong if applied to ethics. Then, I shall argue that verificationism is self-refuting. Finally, I shall argue that constructivism (which I presented in the first round) does offer empirical tests. First, to note first why intuition is important. Keep in mind what my opponent suggests when he is saying everything that is not empirically testable is false. All religious and aeshetic claims according to verificationism are meaningless. Any political policy or ethical claim, as highlighted in this debate, becomes moot. The phrase “We ought to have a small government” or “Murdering children is unjustifiable” become meaningless. You cannot say it is true that children have the right to life, or that government ought to be smaller, as all these ethical claims, my opponent states, are meaningless. If we are to say ethics exists, then we have to reject my opponent’s argument for the reason that ethics is more obviously real than the verification principle. To take the Frege-Geach problem. Consider the following argument: P1 – If stealing is wrong, then getting my brother to steal is wrong. P2 – Stealing is wrong C1 – Therefore, getting my brother to steal is wrong. To quickly state a fact of philosophy, all arguments must consist of propositions and only propositions. Propositions are in essence statements that are either true or false. However, if we take this argument, suppose verificationism. If all ethical claims are meaningless, then the second premise is meaningless. Moreover, the first premise must be meaningless – in fact, it ought to make no sense whatsoever. The phrase “If then” signals a logical operator, and logical operators can only connect propositions. But as it connects two meaningless sentences (“Stealing is wrong” and “Getting my brother to steal is wrong”), then the first premise is illegible. And finally, the conclusion must not logically follow. However, clearly, the conclusion logically follows from the two premises. If the two premises are correct, then the conclusion is necessarily true (and meaningful). Yet verificationism says the conclusion is not meaningful. The logical conclusion, therefore, is that verification is false, and logic is true (for it is more likely that verificationism is mistaken than the well-established laws of logic). My second argument is the argument from self-contradiction. Firstly, keep in mind that verificationism states that anything which cannot be empirically tested is meaningless. Secondly, the principle of verification cannot be tested. So the logical conclusion is that the verification principle is meaningless. So one cannot use it as a system to refute the resolution. Finally, note that my theory made empirical claims. If my theory is true, then “ethics is a social evaluator”. This means what is ethical will tend to be expressed by all persons – for example, the vast majority of people will agree murder is a moral (as opposed to a-moral; murder has ethical implications) act, while your personal taste in clothing is not. As such, my theory is able to be falsified, and able to therefore be given evidence to support it. Just as a game of football has rules that most would recognise, so does my theory. While it is not definitive verifiable evidence, it does show my theory has empirical elements demanded by verificationism.