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As a general rule of thumb, killing people when there are less extreme measures available to prevent them from hurting others isn't good. You can manufacture reasons to do it anyway, but those weren't presented in the OP, and I think if you're arguing in favor of killing someone the burden of proof should be on you.
If someone broke into your home with the intention to harm you, but instead was easily subdued by you... Could you really argue you should just kill the person rather than wait five minutes for the cops to arrive? Yes, modern day sensibilities, fantasy setting, blah blah blah. But we really don't have anything else to go on here. And we really need that before we can make hard and fast rules in a setting like Pathfinder. The bandits could have been mind controlled by a hag into their acts for all we know.
While I appreciate seeing "general rule" and other qualifiers, your example of "waiting five minutes" paired with absurdly unlikely "what if mind control" caveats seems a little disingenuous and avoids engaging with the messy reality (of the fiction).
It's always about "how much is reasonable? How much can we afford?"
How much can a party of PCs afford to derail their current travel/objective to forcefully transport captive bandits to the regional justice?
Two day's delay?
A week? 3?
When does the simple burden of moving the prisoners for imprisonment/ect become a greater cost than executing them?
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People can be *extremely* uncomfortable with putting a price to a life, especially devaluing one beneath your own, even if they are cannibal bandits (99% the GM did NOT want the party to detour & cart the bandits).
Yet, that's the messy truth of it. No matter how you approach your judgement process, someone needs to say
"Yes, the detour will be 3 days, we can risk delaying our rescue of the princess and take these bandits to town."or"No, I'm sorry you lot, but we can't afford the delay, and we...
That is a super long way to say that evil is justified by logistics. I really don't see what you're saying as any kind of ethical or meta-ethical argument about when an action is moral or immoral, just a detailed explanation of what makes being truly good very inconvenient.
Players in my game constantly take and then release prisoners. And, in fact, by my light your quote either undermines your post, or undermines itself, because if these bandits are free willed it's impossible in principle to know whether or not they will commit future crimes at all.