The categorical imperative vs. the principle of utility

I would first like to sincerely thank Lickdafoot for agreeing to debate this topic with me. I've been reading and thinking a lot about this subject and am glad she was so flexible with regards to the specific topic of debate. I also wish her the best of luck.Premise 1: Apriori of communication and argumentationJustification of any proposition must come through argumentation. This concept was expressed by Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel and later expanded upon by Hans Hermann-Hoppe. The basic formulation goes as follows. Any attempt to deny that argumentation is necessary to justify a proposition unintentionally affirms what they are attempting to deny. Hoppe writes: "It must be presupposed that any intellectual position, that it is meaningful and can be argued with regard to its cognitive value, simply because it is presented in a language and communicated. To argue otherwise would already implicitly admit its validity."[1] So to argue against the concept that argumentation is necessary is to already assume the opposite of what you're arguing against by the very fact that you are arguing against it. This has been called a performative contradiction because one acts in a way that contradicts what they are saying. Premise 2: Argumentation presupposes universalizabilityIf argumentation is a necessary requisite for the justification of any proposition, it logically follows that any presuppositions of argumentation are justified via the same reasoning as P1. For to deny presuppositions of discourse as unjustified would be to deny argumentation itself as a requisite for justification. Since I have shown the latter, the former is implied.To show the reasoning behind the universalization principle, Kant offers the example of a lie. Imagine that you wish to get out of a ticket after you're pulled over for speeding. A good way might be to lie to the police officer by saying that you're wife is in labor and you were rushing to the hospital. This might get you out of the ticket, but Kant argued that to universalize the act of lying is to will that your lie would fail. This is because in order for a lie to work, one must operate under a general framework of truth telling. Otherwise no one would believe you. But if everyone in the world were to make it a habit to lie about everything, surely anyone you tried to lie to would suspect you as such. So to lie is to contradict yourself because you implicitly will that the lie fails. We can see through the example of lying that to argue against the universalization of one's maxims for acting is fall into contradiction.Conclusion: One should act so that they could universalize their actionI showed in P1 that in order to justify a proposition, one must use communication and argumentation (called Y) to accomplish that. From this one can deduce that anything which is necessary for the justification of a proposition (called X) is itself justified. As I stated before, to deny X is essentially to deny Y because X must be assumed before Y. Since universalizability is a requisite to the act of argumentation and thus to justification, to argue against the universalization of one's actions is to fall into contradiction.My next round will focus dually on my defense of my above argument and refutation of my opponent's. I now pass the debate on to Con.==========================================================================[1] http://books.google.com...