Set up a debate

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.

Democracy is the best form of government

Whether rule by the people is superior to rule by the wise, the strong, or the expert, and on what grounds.

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.

You are the same person you were ten years ago

Whether there is a persisting self that underlies change, or whether identity over time is a convenient fiction.

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.

Emotions are a better guide to action than reason

Whether we should trust our feelings or our calculations when deciding how to act, and whether the two can even be separated.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of education is to produce good citizens, not successful individuals

Whether schools exist to form people who can sustain a shared public life or to equip individuals to pursue their own advancement.

Death is what gives life its meaning

Whether mortality is the condition that makes choices matter and lives take shape, or whether death is simply the deprivation of everything valuable.

A society without art would be impoverished in a way that matters morally

Whether art is essential to the moral and human quality of a society, or a luxury that adds pleasure but not moral substance.

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.

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.

Preserving a person's mind digitally would be a real continuation of that person

Whether a digital copy of a person's memories and personality would be that person, a new person, or no person at all.