Utilitarianism is the only viable system of morality

In this debate I will argue that utilitarianism is the only viable system of morality. My argument is that all non-utilitarian systems of morality are contradictory or based upon unwarranted assumptions. There are two main components of (normal) utilitarianism - consequentialism and moral non-absolutism. I will discuss each component separately. We will begin with consequentialism. Consequentialism means that we base our decision of what is moral purely on the consequences. Consequentialism takes a broad, rather than a narrow view of consequences. So a perennial question in morality is whether you would condone torture in order to prevent a terrorist attack. If we engage in torture, then the harm inflicted isn"t merely the pain and suffering inflicted on the person who is tortured, but much more. Firstly, there is the fear (or lack of security) that results when the government engages in torture, then there is the discomfort associated with knowing that one"s government engages in such acts, then there is the risk that the government will abuse its powers and lastly there is lost utility from changes in people"s behavior (such as being very careful not to write anything that could be misinterpreted). Consequentialism merely says that whether or not an action is justified depends purely on the consequences, it has nothing to say about which consequences are more important than others. So a consequentialist might generally oppose lying, even if it would save someone"s life, on the grounds that lying makes us unable to trust what each other says and being unable to rely on this costs us significant even more utility than someone dying would. However, if the consequentialist knew for certain that they could get away with it, then they would break their rule about not lying. I"ve been vague on exactly what actions consequentialism (and hence utilitarianism) demand and this is because there are many different opinions of what is or is not moral once utilitarianism is accepted. There are multiple sub-schools. However, this debate isn"t so about what should be done in specific situations, but rather about which systems of morality are or are not viable. So why should we reject systems that aren"t consequentialist. Simply because good outcomes are the only thing that is important, morality is not about proving you are better than other people, that is simply ego. Anything other than the consequences is simply irrelevant, whether it be "virtues" or "moral rules". Those are simply distractions that prevents you from achieving better outcomes. Since virtue ethics and deontology are the two other major schools of moral thought, I"ll address these more specifically. Virtue ethics contents that we should focus on "being virtuous" and that this is more important than actually achieving good outcomes. But this is just as sensible as training all your life to best the best soccer player in the world, but never actually playing a real game. "Being virtuous" is only valuable to the extent that it allows you to make the world a better place. It may make you feel good about yourself and other people feel good to see someone virtuous, but its value is limited to this utility. Similarly, moral principles are only valuable is guidelines in terms of which actions tend to increase utility. If the consequences of following a rule are worse than the consequences of breaking the rule according to any preference function, then we shouldn"t follow the rules. Breaking these rules can be hard as we often have strong emotional attachments to certain actions as "wrong", but this is largely the result of evolution. Evolution encourages us to view certain actions as immoral because when we undertake these actions (ie. murder, theft, cheating) other feel justified in undertaking them too and we all end up worse off. In contrast, groups which are able to cooperate are likely to see an improvement in their member"s reproductive prospects. Since our moral intuitions have evolved to whatever provided a reproductive advantage, we have to be wary about being too accepting about our moral intuitions, which take the form of moral rules. There is simply no way that we can take these as reliable, so it is ludicrous to suggest that we should let these emotions control our actions when we can see that another action would produce a better outcome. In round 3, I will explain why any system that reject moral non-absolutism is incoherent.