Morality is objective.

First of all, I don't consider losing a negative, so don't feel that my name insults me. However, if you want to call me something else, like Qwert Yui, Larz or God, I don't really care. Second, thanks for all those excellent refutations!My CaseIt's easy to dismiss any refutation of objective morality as sociopathic. Often on the news we see people who have very different views of right and wrong, thinking "what sociopaths" without ever engaging with why they believe what they do. One example of this might be people who think murdering Hitler before World War 2 would have been moral, so perhaps murdering a major political leader today before a big war would be moral too (Iran comes to mind). But if murdering them is moral, why not kill off all the low-paid artists and people with moustaches just in case one of them turns out to be a Hitler too? That may sound sociopathic to a person like me, but I cannot logically deduce that their actions will have a worse effect on humanity than inaction. I have to accept that they have a different morality. That's why we need laws against murder and so on. Some people, who may genuinely have the best interests of society and the well-being of all the people in it in mind, without being mentally ill, can still be rationally driven to kill.Con's claim that the exclusion of the alternative is un-necessary because the properties of the item tell you what it is. The problem is that usually we don't know all the properties of every item. Humans suffer from a distinct lack of omniscience, and as a result they have to consider all the possibilities for what something might be - and to determine if something is true, to exclude all possibilities of it being false. With my bay example, you can't always see, upon first approaching a large body of water, if it's a lake or a bay. You have to walk around to exclude the alternative possibility (or drive etc).Second, pro claims hindsight is enough. But hindsight is a linear narrative. Even it does not show us the relative outcomes of two actions. Was the murder of Caesar for the better or for the worse? Well, it lead to the Pax Romana, so some would argue it was for the better. It also led to the bloody wars of succession, so others would say it was for the worse. You can't evaluate it objectively. You have to form a subjective opinion about the relative moral value of past events. As an aside, just because something is not consensual does not mean by definition that it's not enjoyable. I'm not an advocate of rape, but rape advocates would argue that consent is relative, and that domination is in some cases necessary to establish. If I had the letter count, I would show how both of these can be justified by history. Maybe next round. The point is that hindsight can be used to justify two completely opposing moral positions.Finally he makes the interesting claim that "the mere fact we don't (or even can't) know the answers to certain questions doesn't put such answers in the realm of subjectivity." Let's revisit how pro defined subjective: "dependant on personal opinion". If we don't know the answers, the best we can do is form an opinion about who's right. Take God. Despite some people's claims, nobody really knows whether there's a magic guy up there smiting and blessing as he sees fit. People therefore form opinions about whether they believe in God. What I've done is I've proven you can't know the answer to moral questions, independantly of your own opinion. And that's what matters in this debate. That's my strategy.Pro's CasePro seemed to misunderstand one of my most important objections so let me clarify: it was what pro just labelled "P2" that I had no objection to. "P3" is where my objection was centered. And it wasn't about what's right and wrong, or that people disagree (which is true, by the way, but not the point). It was about how some people have morals completely disconnected from well-being. Pro's case completely ignores this considerable part of morality. The real reason why my opponent won't respond to my "heap of questions" is because they have nothing to do with his case - but they have everything to do with the motion, the full extent of which he conveniently ignores. I hope my opponent can manage to response to this argument in the next round.What pro did contest very well was "P1" so I'll deal with that now. Right at the end of his refutation of my refutation, pro conceeded that something can have several "objectively" true answers. That's false if the answers are incompatible. You can't say the Golden Rule and the opposite of the Golden Rule are BOTH objectively true because people cannot take both as moral actions - that's like killing and not killing a person. You cannot have two exclusive alternatives as objective morals - only subjective morality can provide such a scenario.The reason why a moral question is different from a scientific question is that one is based on proof, the other is based on belief. Some find smoking or gambling morally repulsive. Some think the afterlife is better with suicide. You can't prove any of these things are true. You can prove that carbon isotopes decay at a certain rate, and that based on that certain carbon structures must have been around for longer than 6000 years, or that based upon the rate of expansion in the universe it must be older than a few billion years, if one was to grant a few basic rules of physics in both cases. On both of these counts, and many others, you can exclude the possibility of a 6000-year-old world logically. You can't do that with moral questions.So basically while I agree Leonidas may be wrong, I also believe that none of us have any clue whether that is actually true or not. We have opinions about what is right and wrong, not objectively-verifiable facts. Disagreement may not mean subjectivity, but a lack of an objective way to test it, the only thing we can do is be subjective in our belief. The only difference between 3+3=8 and "killing is good" is that one can be proven, the other cannot.Finally let's consider "P4". My opponent completely misunderstands this counter-argument, so I'm going to lay it out like he does.1. M concerns RW2. RW is O3. Thus M is OThat's pro's logic. In his case, M is morality, RW is right/wrong, and O is objective. Remember that morality is not right/wrong itself, it is merely the principles we have concerning what is right/wrong. My contention is that even if right/wrong are objective, it does not follow that the principles concerning right/wrong are objective. To contextualise this, let's use my analogy. I'm concerned with winning a text-based debate. Winning such a debate is text-based. Am I therefore text-based? No, that's absurd. This book is concerned with maths. Maths is hard. That doesn't mean the book is hard - it may be particulary easy to follow. Religion is (in part) concerned with the afterlife. The afterlife is mysterious. Does that mean religion is mysterious? Not necessarily. How many more examples do you need? In the context of this debate - "thou shalt not steal" is a moral command concerned with the moral value of theft. The moral value of theft is objective (just assume that's true). Does that neccessarily mean that the moral value of the command is also objective? You work it out.I look forward to the final round.