I affirm the resolution Before I begin, Id like to offer the following definitions.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines morality as either a descriptive or normative code of conduct. Basically, it just tells us what we ought and ought not do, i.e. what is and is not morally permissible. Observation one: The aff must only prove that using targeted killing is a permissible response in order to affirm. Therefore, it is the sufficient negative burden to show that using lethal force is not permissible. Observation two: If the aff proves that morality is subjective and constantly changing, presume all possible responses as permissible. Without some moral code guiding our decisions and telling us what is right and wrong, it would open up any possibility for us to permissibly use to respond to the situation. Thus, the sufficient affirmative burden is to show that morality is subjective or that all moral theories fail. Furthermore, the negative must prove that morality is objective. Observation three: DAs dont link because Im not defending an action, only permissibility. Morality is subjective and everyone has their own specific morality that they adhere to. With so many different forms of morality, it is impossible to come to an agreement on which version of morality is the best to use in the given situation. Furthermore, morality can change over time, therefore making the choice of which morality is best even more impossible to come to. Koons[1] writes if moral truth were determined by the generation of some affective response, then this would lead to objectionable sorts of moral relativism. After all, our psychology is contingent, and not necessarily shared by all rational creatures, or even by all humans. Thus, one might wonder if humans had different affective responses, would that make morality different? Imagine, for example, the possible worlds in which we experience moral emotions or desires under different conditions than in the actual world. Are there possible worlds in which, say, kicking dogs is morally required? It seems likely that there are on this view. Or imagine an alien race whose psychology differed from our own. This race might have an affective nature very different from ours. But if moral truth is response-dependent, then wouldnt their morality by true-for-them, and ours true-for-us? Or perhaps we would decide that since this alien races morality-detemining responses were so different from ours, that they werent practicing morality in the first place, but instead schmorality. Maybe we couldnt engage in moral argumentation; we could only talk past one another. This problem might even arise closer to home. Not all people have the same psychological responses; is morality different for these different people? It is also possible that our responses to various actions vary from culture to culture and from era to era; does this mean that moral truth is itself relative and changeable?
Many have worried that

Therefore, if morality is relative and changeable, it is impossible to discuss what will always be a moral response to something. This makes all possible responses permissible because without some code of good or bad telling us what we ought and ought not do, it allows us to do what we wish and react to situations how we wish to. Mackie[2] continues

The argument from relativity has as its premise the well-known variation in moral codes from one society to another and from one period to another, and also the differences in moral beliefs between different groups and classes within a complex community. Such variation is in itself merely a truth of descriptive morality, a fact of anthropology which entails neither first order nor second order ethical views. Yet it may indirectly support second order subjectivism: radical differences between first order moral judgments make it difficult to treat those judgments [them] as apprehensions of objective truths. But it is
not the mere occurrence of disagreements that tells against the objectivity of values. Disagreement on questions in history or biology or cosmology does not show that there are no objective issues in these fields for investigators to disagree about. But such scientific disagreement results from speculative inferences or explanatory hypotheses based on inadequate evidence, and are hardly plausible to interpret moral disagreement in the same way.

adherence to and The causal connection seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy. Of course, the standards may be an idealization of the way of life from which they arise: the monogamy in which people participate may be less complete, less rigid, than that of which it leads them to approve. This is not to say

Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people's participation in different ways of life.

moral heretics and moral reformers, people who have turned against the established rules and practices of their own communities for moral reasons, and often for moral reasons that we would endorse. But this can usually be understood as the extension, in ways which, though new and unconventional, seemed to them to be required for consistency, of rules to which they already adhered as arising out of an existing way of life. In short, the argument from relativity has some force simply because the actual variations in the moral codes arc more readily
that moral judgments arc purely conventional. Of course there have been and arc explained by the hypothesis that they reflect ways of life than by the hypothesis that they express perceptions, most of them seriously inadequate and badly distorted, of objective values.

Furthermore, even the definitions of good and bad are subjective and subject to change. One person might see something as good, while another person might see that same thing as horribly bad. Without these two basic definitions, it is impossible to be able to form any type of morality. Nietzsche[3] writes
Owing to a scrupulosity peculiar to myself, which I confess reluctantly,--it concerns indeed morality,--a scrupulosity, which manifests itself in my life at such an early period, with so much

my curiosity and my suspicion felt themselves betimes bound to halt at the question, of what in point of actual fact was the origin of our Good and of our Evil. Indeed, at the boyish age of thirteen
spontaneity, with so chronic a persistence and so keen an opposition to environment, epoch, precedent, and ancestry that I should have been almost entitled to stile it my a priori the problem of the origin of Evil already haunted me: at an age when games and God divide ones heart, I devoted to that problem my first childish attempt at the literary game, my first

I gave quite properly the honour to God, and made him the father of Evil. Did my own a priori demand that precise solution from me? That new, immoral, or at least amoral a priori and that categorical imperative which
philosophic essayand as regards my infantile solution of the problem, well, was its voice (but, oh! How hostile to the Kantian article, and how pregnant with problems!), to which since then I have given more and more attention, and indeed what is more than attention. Fortunately I soon learned to separate theological from moral prejudices, and I gave up looking for a supernatural origin of evil. A certain amount of historical and philological education, to say

Under what conditions did Man invent for himself those judgments of values, Good and Evil? And what intrinsic value do they possess in themselves? Have they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being? Are they a symptom of the distress, impoverishment, and degeneration of Human Life? Or, conversely, is it in them that is manifested the fullness, the strength, and the will of Life, its courage, its self-confidence, its future? On this point I found and hazarded in my
nothing of an innate faculty of psychological discrimination par excellence succeeded in transforming almost immediately my original problem into the following one: -mind the most diverse answers, I established distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I became a specialist in my new conjectures, new probabilities; until at last I had a land of my own and a soil of my own, a whole secret world growing and flowering, like hidden gardens of whose existence no one could have an inklingoh, how happy are we, we finders of knowledge, provided that we know how to keep silent sufficiently long.

Thus, the definitions of good and bad are themselves indefinite and changeable based upon an individuals perspective. This links into the debate because without these two definitions, forming a concept of morality becomes impossible. Moreover, even if we know what morality is there is no way we could know if those moral principles are something we would accept. Nietzsche 2 writes the real homestead of the concept good did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves, that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that their actions were good, that is to say of the first order, in contradistinction of all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the plebeian. It was out of this pathos of
Now the first argument that comes ready to my hand is that distance that they first arrogated the right to create values for their own profit, and to coin the names of such values: what had they to do with utility? The standpoint of utility is as alien and as inapplicable as it could possibly be, when we have to deal with so volcanic an effervescence of supreme values, creating and demarcating as they do a hierarchy within themselves: it is at this juncture that one arrives at an appreciation of the contrast to that tepid temperature, which is the presupposition on which every combination of worldly wisdom and every calculation of practical

expedience is always badand not for one occasional, not for one exceptional instance, but chronically. The pathos of nobility of distance, as I have said, the chronic and despotic esprit de corps

a higher dominant race coming into association with a meaner race, an under race, this is the origin of the antithesis of good and bad.
and fundamental instinct of

Thus, even if the definitions of good and bad are finite and definite, they themselves are not true and cannot work in any moral theory. Next, even if morality is objective, moral theories cannot work and justify actions for two reasons: First: If moral theories were true, then we would possess a unique sensory or perceptory process that would allow us to judge our actions and automatically perform the correct moral action. Since humans do not possess said process, all moral theories are unverifiable and therefore presumably false. Mackie 2[4] writes: Of course the suggestion that moral judgments are made or moral problems solved by just sitting down and having an ethical intuition is a travesty of actual moral thinking. But, however complex the real process, it will require (if it is to yield authoritatively prescriptive conclusions) some input of this distinctive sort, either premises or forms of argument or both. When we ask the awkward question, how can we be aware of this authoritative prescriptivity, of the truth of these distinctively ethical premises or of the cogency of this distinctively ethical pattern of reasoning, none of our ordinary accounts of sensory perception or introspection or the framing and confirming of explanatory hypotheses or inference or logical construction or conceptual analysis, or any combination of these, will provide a satisfactory answer; a special sort of intuition is a lame answer, but it is the one to which the clear headed objectivist is compelled to resort. Thus, because we cannot verify whether moral theories work, it frees us from the bonds of a moral code of right and wrong and allows us to react to situations as we deem fit, making responses such as targeted killing permissible. Second: Objective moral theories are false because they are developed retroactively. Instead of forming a moral theory and then adhering to its tenants, moral theories are formed to justify actions already taken. Mackie 3 writes: radical differences between first order moral judgments make it difficult to treat those judgments as apprehensions of objective truths. But it is not the mere occurrence of disagreements that tells against the objectivity of values. Disagreement on questions in history or biology or cosmology does not show that there are no objective issues in these fields for investigators to disagree about. But such scientific disagreement results from speculative inferences or explanatory hypotheses based on inadequate evidence, and it is hardly plausible to interpret moral disagreement in the same way. Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect peoples adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connection seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy.
Yet it may support second order subjectivism:

Thus I affirm.