[ineedasername]

Ethics are subjective. Asking "Is it ethical?" to a large group of people is little better than asking "Is chocolate the best flavor of ice cream?"

Legality is a more concrete and easier to give a firm answer to. If you want to have a reasonable conversation on the internet with random strangers of different belief systems, questions like "is it ethical" go right out the window.

[jeofken]

Are you objectively sure it’s subjective?

Ethics must be objective/universal, although cheating it is common and alluring.

Because ethics are universal the rules make sense even for children. It is wrong to lie, steal, rape, and kill, while it is right to honestly tell stories, receive gifts, have sex, and give life. In these words definition lies whether the receiving party partakes voluntary or is forced to.

Legality on the other hand is defined by who controls most guns. If might is right, why should not the strong group genocide the weak?

[ineedasername]

Ethics must be objective/universal

That's a bold statement without accepted axioms & subsequent proofs to build off of & establish the universality of ethics. There has never been universal agreement on any set of ethics. Genocide is itself an excellent example of that: It's not hard to find examples where those participating in the genocide believed their actions to be perfectly acceptable.

If you watch children for any length of time, you'll see that "universal ethics" are not readily apparent to them either. Children have to be taught not to hit people, that they can't take another child's toy (stealing) just because they want it, that lying isn't acceptable, etc. Plenty of people never learn those lessons, and have no problem violating them when the consequences can be avoided (and even many times when they can't)

Your other examples of what is right & wrong are also not universally agreed upon. It's not hard to find examples of any of those actions where people justify their actions as acceptable.

This is without even getting into the gray areas: Is it wrong to kill in self defense? Is it right to honestly tell your neighbor the story that his wife is cheating on him if he'd previously said "I'd kill my wife if she ever cheated on me"? Is it right for puppy mills to give life to animals it will kill in a few months if someone doesn't buy them? Is it right to accept a gift from someone who stole the money to purchase it? Is it wrong to lie if the lie would save an innocent life?

If ethics are universal, then the underlying principals have yet to be discovered.

[jeofken]

To downvoters - I welcome your disapproval like Socrates welcomed his hemlock ;)

I claim that ethics if they exist must be universal.

If ethics are not universal, ie it is right to steal from some but not from others, you will never find a definition of ethics that can be agreed upon by more than 1 person, and their answer will change over time as they rise or sink in power position.

That definition of ethics taken to its logical conclusion is that might = right.

If might is right, then it is right for the strong race to genocide the weak, for the majority to tax the minority, for the master to keep the slave, for a man to rape a woman, and a parent to beat their child.

Opposed to that there are universal ethics - that one rule applies to many parties. For example, the difference in meaning between “receive gift” and “steal” is whether the action is universally ethical. Receiving a gift is voluntary for both parties, and a rule that allows it can thus be universally ethical.

Does this make sense? I can try to give other examples of how this principle makes sex ethical but rape not (do you dare to disagree?), self-defence ethical but assault not, and also how an insurance company collecting payment is ethical, but a government demanding tax is not.

Regarding the claim that even kids understand this: you are right that kids like adult try to get away with not acting according to universalist ethics. But if you speak to them and ask if they think it’s ok that someone takes their toy, they will say no. If you then ask them if it is ok for them to take someone else's toy, they will begrudgingly agree it isn’t. If you ask them what they would think if 5 kids voted and agreed you should give your toy away, they disagree.

Since universalist ethics are true, they intuitively make sense to us, and they also evidently produce the best societies - why comparatively universalist Christendom became the most free and developed place, why land-locked zero-resources relatively stateless Switzerland flourishes while the socialist resource-rich countries suffer in inefficiency and poverty for the masses, etc.