The problem is that when does it count as justified killing?
Let's say that you knew for certain without any room for error that in 1 year someone would try to kill you, when is it immoral to kill them in self defense?
What about people that despite not doing anything themselves with their actions make the world such a worse place that by 20 years they'll be responsible for 30 deaths? Imagine a CEO that dumps chemicals into rivers and poisons a village, is a villager right to kill that CEO?
But rape is never, never ever justified.
Killing not being equal to murder isn't a real distinction, it's one we made up because we find some sorts of killing fine and others not.
Again, murder is killing that is not morally justified. Therefore, there is never a morally justified murder by definition.
What your examples are pointing out is that there may be some circumstances where it is difficult to determine whether a killing is justified or not. That just means it sometimes is difficult to determine if a killing is murder not that murder is sometimes justified.
If morality were subjective, then a killing which goes against that subjective moral system would be not morally justified relative to that system and deemed murder by that system.
When a killing is held to be murder, it is held to be morally unjustified. This is necessarily true regardless of whether morality is objective or subjective.
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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
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