MORAL REALISM

Moral realism is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world, some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism (the view that moral statements can be true or false) with an ontological orientation (a focus on what kinds of things exist). This is in opposition to other forms of cognitivism, which will be covered in this “moral semantics section,” such as all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism, error theory, and non-cognitivism (the view that moral statements do not state facts at all).

Within moral realism, the two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism (morality grounded in natural facts, like human needs or biology) and ethical non-naturalism (morality grounded in special, irreducible moral facts). Many philosophers claim that moral realism may be dated back at least to Plato as a philosophical doctrine and that it is a fully defensible form of moral theory. One study found that 56% of philosophers accept or lean towards moral realism. Pretty surprising.

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Some notable examples of robust moral realists include David Brink, John McDowell, Peter Railton, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Michael Smith, Terence Cuneo, Russ Shafer-Landau, G. E. Moore, John Finnis, Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, and Norman Geras. AS you can see, a lot of notable figures are moral realists. It has also been argued that Karl Marx was a moral realist.

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Moral realism has been studied in various philosophical and practical applications. A delineation of moral realism into a minimal form, a moderate form, and a robust form has been put forward in the literature. The robust model of moral realism commits moral realists to three theses:

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(Quick note for anyone who is not familiar with logical terms: a proposition is something that can be either true or false. According to the Law of Non-Contradiction and the Law of the Excluded Middle, a proposition cannot be both true and false, nor can it fall somewhere in between.)

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1. The semantic thesis: The primary semantic role of moral predicates is to refer to moral properties so that moral statements purport to represent moral facts and express propositions that are true or false.
    

2. The alethic thesis: Some moral propositions are, in fact, true.
    

3. The metaphysical thesis: Moral propositions are true when actions and other objects of moral assessment have the relevant moral properties. Where these facts and properties are robust, their metaphysical status, whatever it is, is not relevantly different from that of ordinary non-moral facts and properties.
    

The minimal model, i.e., moral universalism (the idea that moral rules apply to everyone), which is covered in the moral ontology section of this website, leaves off the metaphysical thesis, treating it as a matter of contention among moral realists. This dispute is not insignificant, as acceptance or rejection of the metaphysical thesis is taken by those employing the robust model as the key difference between moral realism and moral anti-realism.

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Indeed, the question of how to classify certain logically possible views (such as the rejection of the semantic and alethic theses in conjunction with the acceptance of the metaphysical thesis) turns on which model we accept. Someone employing the robust model might call such a view “realist non-cognitivism,” while someone employing the minimal model might simply place such a view alongside other, more traditional forms of non-cognitivism. The robust model and the minimal model also disagree over how to classify moral subjectivism. The historical association of subjectivism with moral anti-realism in large part explains why the robust model of moral realism has been dominant, even if only implicitly, in both traditional and contemporary philosophical literature on meta-ethics. In the minimal sense of realism, R. M. Hare could be considered a realist in his later works, as he is committed to the objectivity of value judgments even though he denies that moral statements express propositions with truth values.

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Similarly, moral constructivists like John Rawls and Christine Korsgaard may also be realists in this minimalist sense. The latter describes her own position as “procedural realism” (the idea that moral truth comes from following fair procedures of reasoning). Some readings of evolutionary science, such as those of Charles Darwin and James Mark Baldwin, have suggested that insofar as an ethic may be associated with survival strategies and natural selection, such behavior may be associated with a moderate position of moral realism, equivalent to an “ethics of survival.”

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Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that the game-theoretic (mathematical study of strategy and cooperation) advantages of ethical behavior support the idea that morality is “out there” in a certain sense. Journalist Robert Wright has similarly argued that natural selection moves sentient species closer to moral truth as time goes on. Writer Sam Harris has also argued that ethics could be objectively grounded in an understanding of neuroscience; he has admitted to being committed to some form of moral realism and some form of consequentialism (judging morality by outcomes).

Moral realism allows the ordinary rules of logic to be applied straightforwardly to moral statements. We can say that an immoral belief is false, unjustified, or contradictory in the same way we would about a factual belief. This is a problem for expressivism, as shown by the Frege-Geach problem (the challenge of explaining moral logic if moral statements don’t state facts - a problem I recommend emotivists and quasi-realists, which is covered later in the non-cognitivist section of this website, should check out).

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Another advantage of moral realism is its capacity to resolve moral disagreements. If two moral beliefs contradict one another, realism says that they cannot both be right, and therefore everyone involved ought to be seeking out the right answer to resolve the disagreement. Contrary theories of meta-ethics have trouble even formulating the statement “this moral belief is wrong,” and so they cannot resolve disagreements in this way. Proponent Philippa Foot adopts a moral realist position, criticizing Stevenson’s idea that when evaluation is superposed on facts, there has been a committal in a new dimension. She introduces, by analogy, the practical implications of using the word injury: not just anything counts as an injury; there must be some impairment. When we suppose a man wants the things the injury prevents him from obtaining, haven’t we fallen into the old naturalist fallacy?

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It may seem that the only way to make a necessary connection between injury and the things that are to be avoided is to say that it is only used in an action-guiding sense when applied to something the speaker intends to avoid. But we should look carefully at the crucial move in that argument: the suggestion that someone might happen not to want anything for which he would need the use of hands or eyes. Hands and eyes, like ears and legs, play a part in so many operations that a man could only be said not to need them if he had no wants at all. Foot argues that the virtues, like hands and eyes in the analogy, play so large a part in so many operations that it is implausible to suppose that a committal in a non-naturalist dimension is necessary to demonstrate their goodness. Philosophers who have supposed that actual action was required if goods were to be used in a sincere evaluation have got into difficulties over weakness of will, and they should surely agree that enough has been done if we can show that any man has reason to aim at virtue and avoid vice.

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But is this impossibly difficult? If we consider the kinds of things that count as virtue and vice, consider, for instance, the cardinal virtues: prudence, temperance, courage, and justice, obviously any man needs prudence. But does he not also need to resist the temptation of pleasure when there is harm involved? And how could it be argued that he would never need to face what was fearful for the sake of some good? It is not obvious what someone would mean if he said that temperance or courage were not good qualities, and this not because of the praising sense of these words but because of the things that courage and temperance are. Several criticisms have been raised against moral realism. The first is that while realism can explain how to resolve moral conflicts, it does not explain how these conflicts arose in the first place. Others appeal to basic human psychology, arguing that people possess various motivations that combine in complex ways, or else are simply mistaken about what is objectively right. Others are critical of moral realism because it postulates the existence of a kind of moral fact that is non-material and does not appear to be accessible to the scientific method. Moral truths cannot be observed in the same way as material facts, so it seems odd to count them in the same category. However, such an argument could be applied to saying that the science of psychology also cannot be a science, or the acceptance of psychology as a cognitive science vitiates this argument.

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One emotivist counterargument alleges that wrong actions produce measurable results in the form of negative emotional reactions: either within the individual transgressor, within the person or people most directly affected by the act, or within a consensus of direct or indirect observers. Another counterargument comes from moral realism’s ethical naturalism.

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Summary – moral realism is the cognitivist view that moral statements (such as "killing is bad" or "stealing is bad") can be true or false because they describe real features of the world, not just feelings or expressions. Some philosophers trace this idea all the way back to Plato, and many people today find it appealing because it treats moral debates as genuine disagreements in which one side can be objectively right or wrong. Critics argue, however, that moral facts are difficult to prove since they cannot be observed or measured like physical facts. Supporters respond that morality can still be grounded in human needs, virtues, evolution, science, etc.