Part 2 A Case for Moral Realism
Part 2
A Case for Moral Realism
In this section we will defend moral realism, a theory of metaethics. Metaethics is the branch of ethics that explores the status of our moral claims. It asks whether moral judgments express real propositions and, if so, whether any of them is true. And if that is the case, in what sense is it true? It also inquires about what authority, if any, moral claims have on us and what the relationship is between morality and rationality.
Moral realism affirms that there are objective moral truths that do not depend on human culture or opinion. They are, at least in this sense, on a par with objective scientific facts owing to independently existing features of reality. By “moral truths” we are not referring merely to truths about moral beliefs and practices but to moral truths themselves—like that it is wrong to push people off cliffs to kill them for fun.
Moral realists believe that morality is objectively true in a quite robust sense, not true in a merely subjective sense. So moral realism stands in contrast to a variety of perspectives, among them that morality is an entirely misguided venture, that all moral claims are false, that morality has no propositional content at all, and that morality is a function of personal choice or a social construction.
Chapter 6 will discuss the nature of moral realism in more detail, identifying its putative strengths and a range of concerns that are typically expressed about it. Then, in subsequent chapters (7, 8, and 9), we will examine the theoretical pros and cons of rivals to moral realism: error theory, expressivism, and constructivism, respectively.1 In the last chapter of this section, we will draw the threads of our discussion together and offer a cumulative case for strong moral realism that we find convincing.
1 A fuller treatment than what we can provide here would also discuss sensibility theory. There is a chapter devoted to it in David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, The Good, the Right, and the Real: Is Value a Fact? (Oxford University Press, 2025).