this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Morality is subjective. Ethics are an attempt to quanitify/codify popular/common moral beliefs.
Even "murder is wrong" is not a moral absolute. I consider it highly immoral to deny murder to someone in pain begging for another person like a physician to murder them painlessly simply because of a dogmatic "murder is wrong" stance.
i consider this specific example to also be an issue of language, which is in itself a construct.
Murder as a word has meaning based in law, which is another construct.
If you were to switch out "murder" for "killing" the outcome remains the same (cessation of life by another party) but the ethical and moral connotations are different.
Some people use murder when they mean killing and vice versa which adds a layer of complexity and confusion.
Though all of that could just be me venturing into pedant country.
It's even worse than that. It floors me that it's widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn't murder. It's murder when a contract killer murders by order and gets paid, the fact that a government is paying the contract and giving you a spiffy Lil wardrobe to do it in is a really arbitrary line. They don't even have a proper word for it, they just say "it's not murder.... IT'S WAR!" What a lazy non-argument. It doesn't count because we're doing murder Costco style, in bulk?
I mean yeah, it's people killing people that don't want to die on the behalf of people paying them to either gain something or secure what they have. It's more cut and dry than my first example, where you could argue that if the party to be murdered consents to be murdered, it no longer fits the definition.
As George Carlin said, the word is avoided to soften what needs to be done, to defang language until it is robbed of the emotional weight of what is happening. Target neutralized doesn't have the baggage of human murdered. Don't want those soldiers in the field to internalize the weight of what they're doing, or they won't comply as reliably!
and this is exactly my point, the definition of the word generally points directly to it being killing in a fashion that is unlawful which rests on the applicable law in the context.
Nation state soldiers killing enemy combatants doesn't fit this description in most circumstances. (There are of course rules and exceptions etc etc)
I'm not arguing the morality, I'm arguing the factual definition and it's the reason why i said the language causes it's own issues.
Because it's not. Murder is one sided. War, you are fighting. It's not 1 sided. It's killing, and can easily and is often morally reprehensible. But that does not make it murder. Civilian deaths are still murder in a war.
It's not defanging language. Its using it as it is.
I would argue that's because murder is generally understood to be tangential to state authority where state is defined as the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Killing for the state is war or exercising sovereignty or whatever the reason is, but it's the state's reason and it's weird to call state sanctioned genocide murder even when you acknowledge it as evil and unlawful. Killing against state authority is revolutionary action and while inherently unlawful is also rarely seen as murder. So it makes sense that a state sactioning the killing of actors of another state isn't seen as murder and instead has its own term for the whole tragic situation.
in fact, that "murder is wrong" in in fact not a universally held belief. 20 billion animals wait solely sothat we can murder them eventually to consume their physical remains.
People have been arguing about whether morality is subjective, and writing dissertations about that subject, for thousands of years. Is any of us really familiar enough with that very detailed debate to render a judgment like "morality is subjective" as though it's an obvious fact? Does anybody who just flatly says morality is subjective understand just how complex metaethics is?
https://images.app.goo.gl/fBQbi2J5osxuFmvt7
I think "morality is subjective" is just something we hear apparently worldly people say all the time, and nobody really has any idea.
By the way, I have a PhD in ethics and wrote my dissertation on the objectivity/subjectivity of ethics. Long story short, we don't know shit!
"murder is wrong" is a moral absolute if you adopt the deontological viewpoint. It's not if you adopt the teleological approach. Discussing these things is literally what I learnt in the very short Ethics course I had in third year uni (while in France that sort of stuff was much much earlier during Philosophy class...)
Edit : and to be clear, I think absolute opinions are the province of the philosopher and the fanatic. Real life tends to be a bit more messy. But that's why it's important to sort of know what the options are and how difficult the choices can be (again, for real human beings who struggle with dilemmas ; fanatics tend to eachew all that and I'd say that's how you can spot them).