[sweetjazz]

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Given the new number 1, I don't think anyone can bring up a justifiable defense, but given your caveat of "belief" you are bring in a subjective standard. You then have to put yourself in the person's shoes to see if the belief was reasonable. You have to understand the peron's background and indivudual circumstances. But what if the person was racist and percieved every black person as a threat to him. He then is subjectively justified in killing any black person, but then we have to bring in some sort of objective reasonablness in ("social norm"). I don't think morality is truly only subjective or objective, but I think it can be defined as a counterplay between both standards. If you strictly believe in just an objective standard though, you'll end up coming up with the "wrong" decision in some circumstances.

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Fair enough. We definitely need some sort of social norm, or else we can just all go around making excuses whenever we did something wrong as to why we believed we "had" to do it. There is no doubt that we will sometimes be forced to rely on the subjective beliefs of certain people to decide how to handle a moral issue in society (e.g. a jury deciding whether the police officer could have reasonably believed he was in danger from the watergun).

I tend to think we can generally outline objective principles regarding morality. But applying them to complicated situations in reality requires us to make a certain amount of subjective judgments as to how to weight the various principles at play. So I think I agree with you that there is a counterplay between objective and subjective.