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Comment by bjl | Hacker News Reader

Except not all viewpoints are valid or true. If (as a vast majority of philosophers think) morality is objective, then those people are simply wrong about what is ethical/unethical.

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Error theorists would argue that no moral viewpoints at all are true.

I'm not sure what implications you want people to draw from that statement. It's hard to argue that murder is OK, for example, so it's hard to argue that laws are all subjective expressions of power.

But your example is begging the question. If you frame killing a human being as murder, you've already decided that it's unjust or unlawful. How about the death penalty, euthanasia, extrajudicial execution, war, honour killing or jihad/crusade? In all those cases, the killing party believes their actions are fully justified.

Nobody argues that there is no such thing as murder. It's not begging the question just because people don't agree about edge cases.

You're right; I don't think anyone here is arguing murder isn't real. The argument is that murder is not an objective truth, but rather a subjective truth. This doesn't mean we shouldn't care about murder, just that murder is a conceptual reality.

Isn't that just a tautology, though?

I mean, if someone says "No moral viewpoints are more or less true than others; a person acts ethically as long as they think their actions are fully justified" and "People only do things they think are fully justified" then immoral action is impossible.

I was only drawing attention to an alternative meta-ethical philosophy. You can't talk about murder objectively because murder is subjective. In a legal context, jurisdictions differ over what circumstances make a death considered murderous, just, accidental, or even causal.

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