New Members Tournament: Murder is Never Morally Permissible.

FrameworkMorality shall be interpreted through Kantian Deontology.Christine Korsgaard (1) elaborates,"[W]e must value our moral nature as what I call a form of practical identity, a description under which we value ourselves and find our lives worth living. I claimed that our moral identity, which I took to be equivalent to our human identity, is the ultimate source of reasons, because the moral law is the ultimate source of justification - a consideration must be capable of being embodied in a universalizable maxim if it is to count as a reason at all. So if we are to have any reasons, or to see anything as being valuable, we must value and identify with our nature as moral beings."G. A. Cohen argues (2),"[E]ach person is the morally rightful owner of his own person and powers, and, consequently, that each is free (morally speaking) to use those powers as he wishes, provided that he does not deploy them aggressively against others" (pg. 67).1. States have the power to secede.2. States have the right use their powers peacefully.Thus, states have the right to secede peacefully.Therefore I urge a Con ballot.Morality requires we maintain an act omission distinction:We cannot obligate individuals to take positive action to help others or they would have limitless obligations to help others. This undermines morality’s ability to guide action since in a situation with unlimited obligations one violates morality no matter what one does. Thus, without an act omission distinction, morality can no longer prescribe actions and becomes meaningless. This undermines a utilitarian impact calculus because it always demands the action which promotes the most welfare, regardless of moral constraints. Thus, choosing not to act is always morally permissible, so my opponent cannot create a hypothetical scenario in which your only two choices are to kill someone or to let somebody else die. Letting somebody die is not morally equivalent to murder.CaseContention 1: Murder is always immoral.The Categorical imperative is the law of free will. Korsgaard (3) 2,The Categorical imperative tells us to act only on a maxim that we could will to be a law. And this, according to Kant, is the law of a free will. To see why, we need only compare the problem faced by the free will with the content of the Categorical imperative. The problem faced by the free will is this: the will must have a law, but because the will is free, it must be its own law. And nothing determines what that law must be. All that it has to be is a law. Now consider the content of the Categorical imperative. The Categorical imperative simply tells us to choose a law. Its only constraint on our choice is that it have the form of a law. And nothing determines what that law must be. All that it has to be is a law. Therefore the categorical imperative is the law of a free will. It does not impose any external constraint on the free will’s activities, but simply arises from the nature of the will. It describes what a free will must do in order to be what it is. It must choose a maxim it can regard as a law.Korsgaard (4) continues,The moral law tells us to act only on maxims that all rational beings could agree to act on together in a workable cooperative system.What we can conclude is that under deontology, for an action to be moral you must be able to rationally will it as universal law. Murder is not moral because you cannot rationally will that other people repeat the action of murder onto yourself.Furthermore, actions that lead to the death of human beings undermine everything's value. Korsgaard (5),Kant saw that we take things to be important because they are important to us - and he concluded that we must therefore take ourselves to be important. In this way, the value of humanity itself is implicit in every human choice.15 If normative skepticism is to be avoided - if there is any such thing as a reason for action - then humanity as the source of all reasons and values must be valued for its own sake.If we don't value human life, we can't value anything normatively.Thus, you negate.Sources1. Valuing our Humanity. Christine M. Korsgaard. Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University2. Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. G. A. Cohen. Cambridge UP 19953. Sources of Normativity. Christine M. Korsgaard. Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University.4. ibid