Set up a debate

Lying is never morally justified

Whether truthfulness is an exceptionless duty or one value that must sometimes give way to kindness, safety, or justice.

Good outcomes can justify morally questionable means

Whether the moral quality of an action is determined by its results or whether some acts are wrong regardless of what they achieve.

Eating animals is morally wrong

Whether the pleasure and convenience of eating meat can justify killing and confining sentient creatures.

Moral truths exist independently of human opinion

Whether moral claims can be true or false in the way factual claims are, or whether they express attitudes, conventions, or choices.

Breaking an unjust law is a moral duty

Whether citizens are obligated to disobey laws they judge unjust, or whether the value of legal order requires obedience even to bad laws.

The state may restrict choices to protect people from themselves

Whether governments may override individual choices for the individual's own good, or whether adults have a right to make their own mistakes.

Privacy should yield to security when the two conflict

Whether the state may monitor citizens to prevent crime and terrorism, and how much liberty a society should trade for safety.

Parents should be allowed to genetically enhance their children

Whether parents may use genetic technology to improve their children's traits beyond preventing disease, and what that would do to parenthood, equality, and the children themselves.

Human beings have free will

Whether our choices are genuinely up to us, or whether they are determined by prior causes we did not choose.

Consciousness is nothing more than a physical process

Whether subjective experience can be fully explained by brain activity, or whether there is something about the mind that physics leaves out.

The self is an illusion

Whether there is a unified subject at the center of experience, or whether the sense of being someone is constructed by processes with no one behind them.

Animals have minds in the same sense humans do

Whether the difference between human and animal mental life is one of degree or one of kind.

Science is the only reliable source of knowledge

Whether empirical science exhausts what can genuinely be known, or whether mathematics, ethics, introspection, testimony, and the humanities deliver knowledge of their own.

We should defer to experts even when we disagree with them

Whether intellectual humility requires laypeople to adopt expert consensus over their own judgment, or whether such deference is a form of abdication.

We can be certain of anything at all

Whether any belief is immune to all possible doubt, or whether the most we can achieve is well-justified confidence.

Religious faith can be rational

Whether belief without conclusive evidence can be a reasonable stance, or whether faith by its nature is a failure of rationality.

We can know moral facts the way we know scientific facts

Whether ethics has a subject matter that can be discovered and known, or whether moral claims express attitudes rather than describe facts.

Life can be meaningful without God

Whether meaning requires a transcendent source that confers purpose, or whether human lives can be meaningful on their own terms.

Happiness is the highest good

Whether the ultimate aim of a human life is to be happy, or whether other goods such as virtue, truth, or achievement matter independently of how they make us feel.

The death penalty is justified for the worst crimes

Whether the state may deliberately kill a person as punishment, or whether the practice is incompatible with justice and human dignity.

Punishment should aim to rehabilitate, not to give offenders what they deserve

Whether the justification of punishment lies in transforming the offender and protecting society, or in the moral demand that wrongdoing be answered.

One should obey the law even when it is unjust

Whether the duty to obey law holds independently of its content, or whether unjust laws release citizens from obligation and may demand resistance.

Acts that harm no one but the actor should never be crimes

Whether the state may criminalise self-regarding conduct for the actor's own good or for public morality, or whether harm to others is the only legitimate ground for prohibition.

Forgiveness matters more than justice

Whether releasing wrongdoers from resentment and penalty is a higher value than ensuring they receive what they deserve.

Human rights exist by nature, not by agreement

Whether rights are discovered features of human beings that hold everywhere, or human inventions that exist only where they are recognised and enforced.

We owe as much to distant strangers as to our neighbors

Whether physical and social distance reduce our moral obligations, or whether every person's needs weigh equally regardless of relationship.

Borders should be open to anyone who wishes to migrate

Whether states have the right to exclude peaceful migrants, or whether freedom of movement is a basic human right that borders violate.

Free speech should protect even hateful expression

Whether the case for free expression extends to speech that demeans groups, or whether such speech may be restricted to protect the dignity and safety of its targets.

Sufficiently advanced AI deserves moral consideration

Whether an artificial system could have interests that matter morally, and what we would owe it if it did.

There is such a thing as objective truth

Whether some claims are true regardless of who believes them, or whether truth is always relative to a perspective, culture, or framework.

Adult children have a duty to care for their aging parents

Whether the relationship between parents and children generates binding obligations, or whether care must be freely given to be genuine.