You just said..
"Those are not murder by the predominant moral, religious & legal codes of the day, but rather justifiable homicides."
So morals depend on what the society says is moral. ISIS is a society. It creates laws. It governs. I maintains and builds infrastructure. Therefore, according to what you just said, those beheadings are moral.
How about you read the whole sentence in its context, not just throat you think proves me a liar.
"Those are not murder by the predominant
moral, religious & legal codes
of the day, but rather justifiable homicides."
The bolded section
clearly means I am discussing the 12 Tables of Rome, Deuteronomy, and the other ancient legal directives, not the modern world. Laws like that were the global norm, not the exception. I then
explicitly point out that morality has changed on this issue in the last few hundred years.
Such laws would be aberrations in modern societies, not the norm, which has change and views such killings as wrong.
Likewise, jumping over to ISIS and Assad, this brutal policies they use are at odds with the prevailing moral theorems of the day, so would also be seen as invalid.
I didn't say you believed it. I said if your statement above is correct then he is morally justified. He has a society that also believes as he does or the gassing would not have happened.
As noted above, no society exists in a vacuum. As I stated, at one point in human history, the global consensus would likely not have been concerned with the brutality ISIS or Assad. But we don't live at that point in time, and the modern world is perfectly justified in condemning them and acting accordingly to stop them.
You didn't show that, though. The Romans thought it moral to murder children and then the codified it into law. People don't say, "Hey, let's make a law that says X and then we can think it's moral." Rather, they say, "X is moral, so let's make a law that says so in order for there to be no misunderstanding."
Maxperson, you cannot claim both a moral relativist stance and say that ^ when in the context of this discussion, you have revealed yourself to be supporting a moral objectivist viewpoint by posting:
Just because a society said something was moral or okay, doesn't mean that it was, or that it was justified. The Roman killing his son was still committing murder, even if the law doesn't define it as such.
Pick a position and stick with it.