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Good_Burning_Plastic comments on Subjective vs. normative offensiveness - Less Wrong Discussion
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Game-theoretically, because it's usually better to forgo killing your enemies in exchange for not being killed yourself, unless you're in a position of relative power. Evolutionarily, because we're executing the adaptation of not murdering members of the in-group without a valid reason our friends would accept, and modern culture is conductive to very large in-groups.
Your question also mixes up things a bit. Being a murderer is not a personal quality, it's a fact about a past action. A person who subscribes to the "no murder" contract doesn't murder, so they aren't a murderer. A murderer obviously found a reason not to subscribe to the contract, although they may want to re-subscribe to it, may regret their actions, may find excuses, etc.
Similarly, the whole point of having an objective religion is that God judges people whether they want Him to or not. But this isn't an argument for such a God in fact existing.
Ethics is always consensual. What does it mean to say that a theory of ethics "applies" to me if I don't believe in it and don't act accordingly? What objective test will reveal a theory of ethics to be true, if no person in the world believes in it?
Well, if you use a rigid-designator based definition of "ethical" like e.g. EY does, then "murder is not ethical, even when committed by a pebblesorter" is like "a nine-pebble heap does not contain a prime number of pebbles, even when made by a human" -- they are both technically true, but (in absence of enforcement systems using ethics or primality as their Schelling points) not particularly useful for either predicting or affecting pebblesorters' or humans' actions respectively.
I've always felt that EY's wording ends up using words like "ethical" and "objective" in a different sense from most everyone else, which invariably confuses discussions more than it helps.
The sentence "murder is not ethical, even when committed by a pebblesorter" has two implicit assumptions.
First, that "ethical" means "human!ethical", which causes confusion because other people (not just me) would naively read the sentence as a claim of moral realism, which is a different thing.
And secondly, that "human!ethics" is a nontrivial set that contains such statements as "do not murder" - which is effectively a claim that all possible human cultures in the past or future (a hugely varied set!) share much the same ethics, or else that people who don't are "not human". I disagree with this empirical claim, and find the latter normative one pointless.