What is morality

Morality is an awareness of whether our thoughts and actions are affecting other living things in a loving or unloving way. 

Or that acting unlovingly is morally preferable to acting lovingly?

However, many people believe killing an enemy is morally superior to pure pacifism (hippies/Tibetan monks).

Would you, personally rather be locked in a pitch-black basement full of people who "always act morally" (pacifists) or would you rather be locked in a pitch black basement full of people with knives who "try to predict which is the lesser of two or more potential evils"?

It is a snow-ball effect that is a degradation of humanities integrity. 

...would you  rather live in a world of people with mostly bad intentions?

I believe it is due to a very poor common understanding/definition of the concept of morality itself.

It is a false choice to force anyone to accept that the only two options are "good intentions" and "bad intentions".

Morality is simply a classification of behaviors into acceptable and unacceptable.

Murder has intent.  Unjustified killing is just a killing that hasn't been justified.

I am imagining a scale, or a line, with 'very immoral' over on the left and 'very moral' on the right.   Murder (or 'unjustified killing') is very near the left end, giving to charity somewhere on the right and telling 'white lies' near the middle.   But what is it that determines where they are on the scale?  

Surely 'morality' can't be a measure of 'morality'!  Velocity is a measure of change of position per unit time.  Mass is a measure of inertia/gravitational potential. But what is morality a measure of?  

But people are always saying things like 'murder is immoral'.  That seems a natural and correct thing to say, but you appear to outlaw it.

You can drop "unjustified" entirely

The point being that we do assign things to points along a morality scale.

Space.

The point being that we do assign things to points along a morality scale.

That's because the particular soldier has not been charged with murder, a crime that will likely be judged in a court of law, not because the homicide has been justified.

Some people believe that even the slightest infraction dooms you to eternal hell fire.

Not much "scale" in that case.

But they do rank them.   If X is ranked as more moral than Y then there must be something about X and Y that makes people rank them as they do.  It's fairly universal that murder is ranked as less moral than theft.  It won't really do in the philosophy forum to say that murder is ranked as less moral than theft because murder is less moral than theft...that's not getting us anywhere!

You worship the government?  Someone charges you with a crime, the court presumes innocence, and you are proven guilty.  Proving justifiability might be practical way of defending yourself and getting the trial over with.  That's why stand your ground laws exist, so you don't have to survive a legal battle after already surviving an imminent threat.

I think the issue here is you're treating it as a quantifiable and discrete measure of something. It's more like health or humor we can say something is healthier than something else or something is funnier than something else but they're not discrete measurements of anything.