Moral Realism

Overview

Moral realism is the meta-ethical view that at least some moral claims are objectively true, and that their truth does not depend on what anyone believes, feels, or says about them. When we say that torture is wrong, or that justice requires equal treatment under the law, the moral realist holds that we are not merely expressing our feelings or reporting on our culture's conventions. We are making claims about moral facts, and those facts obtain regardless of whether anyone recognizes them. This is a bold thesis, and it has been the central battleground of meta-ethics for more than a century. The question it addresses is not what is right or wrong in particular cases but whether there are moral facts at all, whether moral claims can be true or false in anything like the way that ordinary factual claims can.

Moral realism stands in opposition to a family of anti-realist positions that deny the objectivity of moral facts. Expressivism, perhaps the most influential anti-realist view, holds that moral claims are not assertions that can be true or false but expressions of attitudes, like cheering or booing. Error theory, a more radical position, agrees that moral claims purport to state facts but argues that they all fail, that there are no moral facts and so every moral claim is false. Constructivism holds that moral facts are constituted by the practical reasoning of rational agents, so that what is right depends on what agents would agree to under ideal conditions. Against all of these positions, the moral realist insists that moral facts are not projections of our attitudes, not errors, and not constructions of practical reason but genuine features of reality.

What makes moral realism philosophically interesting is not just the claim that moral facts exist but the difficulty of saying what kind of facts they are. Moral facts don't seem to be like physical facts. You can't observe them with a microscope or measure them with an instrument. If cruelty is wrong, what kind of property is wrongness? Is it a natural property, something that can be investigated by the methods of science, or is it a non-natural property, something that can be grasped only through moral intuition? This question divides moral realists into two camps. Naturalist moral realists hold that moral properties are identical to or supervene on natural properties, so that moral facts can in principle be discovered by empirical investigation. Non-naturalist moral realists hold that moral properties are sui generis, irreducible to the properties studied by natural science, and that moral knowledge comes through a distinct faculty of moral intuition. This debate, between naturalism and non-naturalism within the realist camp, is one of the liveliest in contemporary meta-ethics, and it connects directly to questions about truth and justice that lie at the heart of ethical life.

Origins

The idea that there are objective moral truths is as old as Western philosophy itself. Aristotle argued that there is a human good, eudaimonia or flourishing, that is objective and not merely a matter of opinion. Plato held that the Form of the Good is the highest reality, more real than the physical objects we encounter in experience. The Stoics believed that there is a rational moral order inherent in the cosmos, and that virtue consists in living in accordance with it. These ancient views were robustly realist in spirit, but they did not distinguish sharply between moral facts and other kinds of facts, between the ethical and the metaphysical. That distinction, and the meta-ethical questions it raises, emerged only in the modern period.

The modern debate about moral realism was ignited by the publication of G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica in 1903. Moore's central argument was the open question argument. For any natural property you might propose as the definition of "good," whether pleasure, desire-satisfaction, or evolutionary fitness, it always remains an open question whether that property is actually good. You can coherently ask, "I know it gives pleasure, but is it good?" This shows, Moore argued, that "good" cannot be defined in terms of any natural property. Good is a simple, non-natural property, known not through empirical investigation but through intuition. Moore's argument dealt a devastating blow to naturalistic moral realism, the view that moral properties are natural properties, and it established non-naturalism as the default realist position for much of the twentieth century.

The middle decades of the twentieth century were largely hostile to moral realism. The logical positivists held that moral claims, since they could not be verified by empirical observation, were literally meaningless, expressions of emotion rather than statements of fact. R.M. Hare's universal prescriptivism held that moral claims were prescriptions, imperatives disguised as assertions, and that their meaning lay in their action-guiding function rather than in any factual content. J.L. Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) presented the most influential error theory, arguing that moral claims purport to describe objective facts but that no such facts exist, so all positive moral claims are false. These positions dominated academic philosophy for decades, and moral realism was widely regarded as naive, a relic of pre-scientific thinking.

The revival of moral realism began in the late 1970s and accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s. Several factors contributed to this revival. The decline of logical positivism removed the verificationist premise that had made moral claims seem meaningless. The work of philosophers like David Brink, Nicholas Sturgeon, and Richard Boyd showed that naturalist moral realism was more defensible than Moore's open question argument had suggested, because moral properties could be identified with natural properties not by definition but by the empirical methods of a mature moral theory. Russ Shafer-Landau's Moral Realism: A Defence (2003) provided the most systematic contemporary defense of non-naturalist moral realism, arguing that moral facts are irreducible but no more mysterious than mathematical or logical facts. David Enoch's Taking Morality Seriously (2011) developed a robust defense of non-naturalism, arguing that the explanatory and practical roles of moral facts justify our belief in them. Today, moral realism is once again a serious and widely held position, and the debate between realism and anti-realism remains the central question of meta-ethics.

Core Ideas

Objective Moral Facts

The thesis that there are objective moral facts is the defining claim of moral realism. A moral fact is objective in the relevant sense if it obtains independently of our beliefs, attitudes, and conventions. If it is a fact that torture is wrong, then it is wrong whether or not anyone believes it is wrong, whether or not any culture condemns it, and whether or not anyone has feelings of disapproval toward it. This is what philosophers call mind-independence, and it is the feature that distinguishes moral realism from subjectivist and constructivist views, which hold that moral facts depend in some way on the attitudes, decisions, or practices of agents.

The claim of objectivity raises the question of how we can know moral facts. If they are independent of our beliefs and attitudes, how do we access them? Moral realists offer different answers. Non-naturalists typically appeal to moral intuition, a faculty of direct apprehension that gives us knowledge of basic moral truths in something like the way that perception gives us knowledge of physical objects. Naturalists argue that moral knowledge comes through the same empirical methods that give us knowledge of natural facts, through observation, theory-building, and inference to the best explanation. Both positions face challenges. The appeal to intuition has been criticized as mysterious and unreliable, since people's intuitions differ widely and are influenced by culture, emotion, and cognitive bias. The naturalist approach faces the difficulty of explaining how empirical investigation could establish specifically moral conclusions rather than merely descriptive ones. These epistemological challenges are among the most serious objections to moral realism, and they connect to broader questions about knowledge and truth that philosophy has grappled with since Descartes.

Moral Properties

Moral properties are the features that moral claims attribute to actions, persons, and states of affairs. When we say that an action is wrong, we are attributing the property of wrongness to it. When we say that a person is just, we are attributing the property of justice. The question of what moral properties are, and how they relate to natural properties, is central to the debate within moral realism between naturalism and non-naturalism.

Naturalist moral realists hold that moral properties are natural properties, properties that can be investigated by the methods of empirical science. On this view, wrongness might be identical to, or constituted by, some natural property like causing unnecessary suffering or violating a social contract. The naturalist argues that moral claims can be reduced to or identified with claims about natural facts, so that the wrongness of an action is simply the natural property that explains why we call it wrong. This position is attractive because it makes moral facts respectable by scientific standards, but it faces the challenge of Moore's open question argument, which seems to show that no natural property can be identical to a moral property.

Non-naturalist moral realists hold that moral properties are irreducible to natural properties. Wrongness is not identical to any natural property, no matter how complex. It is a sui generis property, as different from natural properties as the property of being a prime number is from the property of being a physical object. The non-naturalist argues that the failure of naturalistic reductions is not a defect of particular attempts but a feature of the moral domain, a sign that moral properties belong to a different ontological category. This position preserves the autonomy of ethics but at the cost of making moral properties seem mysterious, since they cannot be investigated by the standard methods of empirical science.

Cognitivism

Cognitivism is the thesis that moral claims are the kind of thing that can be true or false. When someone says "murder is wrong," they are not merely expressing disapproval or issuing a command. They are making an assertion, a claim that purports to describe how things are, and that assertion is either true or false. Moral realism entails cognitivism, because if there are moral facts, then moral claims that state those facts can be true, and moral claims that contradict those facts can be false.

Cognitivism is opposed by non-cognitivism, the view that moral claims do not assert propositions and cannot be true or false. The most influential form of non-cognitivism is expressivism, which holds that moral claims express attitudes rather than state facts. "Murder is wrong," on this view, is more like saying "Boo to murder!" than like saying "Murder causes suffering." Expressivism has sophisticated modern forms, developed by Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard, which can handle many of the phenomena that initially seemed to favor cognitivism, such as the logic of moral argument and the possibility of moral disagreement. But expressivism still faces the challenge of explaining the surface grammar of moral discourse, which looks very much like the grammar of factual assertion, and the difficulty of making sense of moral error, the possibility that we might be wrong about what is right and wrong.

Non-Naturalism vs Naturalism

The debate between non-naturalism and naturalism is the central internal dispute within moral realism. Both positions agree that there are objective moral facts, but they disagree about what kind of facts these are. Non-naturalism, the older position, traces its origin to Moore's Principia Ethica and holds that moral properties are irreducible to natural properties. Naturalism, which has been developed most fully in the work of Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink, holds that moral properties are natural properties, though not necessarily ones that can be defined in simple terms.

The debate turns on several issues. The first is the open question argument, which non-naturalists take to show that moral properties cannot be identified with natural properties and which naturalists argue is either invalid or inconclusive. The second is the question of explanatory role: do moral facts explain anything beyond themselves? Naturalists argue that they do, that moral facts help explain phenomena like social cooperation, the development of legal institutions, and the patterns of moral disagreement and convergence. Non-naturalists are more skeptical about the explanatory role of moral facts, arguing that their primary role is normative rather than explanatory, telling us what to do rather than why things happen. The third issue is epistemological: if moral properties are non-natural, how can we know them? Non-naturalists appeal to intuition, while naturalists argue that moral knowledge comes through the same empirical methods that give us knowledge of other natural facts. This debate is not merely technical. It bears directly on the status of virtue ethics and deontology, the two dominant traditions in normative ethics, because the plausibility of these traditions depends in part on the meta-ethical framework that grounds them.

Major Thinkers

G.E. Moore (1873-1958) was the founder of modern non-naturalist moral realism. His Principia Ethica (1903) introduced the open question argument and the doctrine that "good" is a simple, non-natural property, known through intuition rather than empirical investigation. Moore's influence on twentieth-century philosophy was enormous, not only through his substantive positions but through the questions he posed. The open question argument remains the most discussed argument in meta-ethics, and the distinction between natural and non-natural properties continues to structure the debate within moral realism. Moore's emphasis on clarity and conceptual analysis also helped define the methodological commitments of analytic philosophy.

Russ Shafer-Landau (b. 1963) is one of the most important contemporary defenders of non-naturalist moral realism. His Moral Realism: A Defence (2003) is the most systematic contemporary statement of the position, arguing that moral facts are irreducible but not thereby mysterious. Shafer-Landau's central move is to argue that moral facts are analogous to logical and mathematical facts, which are also non-natural but are not for that reason problematic. He also develops a sophisticated response to the epistemological objection, arguing that moral knowledge comes through consideration of cases and principles, a process of reflective equilibrium that is no less reliable than the methods used in other domains of inquiry.

David Enoch (b. 1972) has developed one of the most robust contemporary defenses of moral realism in Taking Morality Seriously (2011). Enoch argues for a version of non-naturalism that he calls "robust realism," holding that moral facts are fully objective, irreducible, and independent of any agent's attitudes or practices. His distinctive contribution is the "deliberative indispensability" argument, which holds that we cannot help taking morality seriously in our practical deliberation, and that this commitment gives us prima facie justification for believing in moral facts. Enoch also defends the explanatory role of moral facts, arguing that they figure in the best explanations of certain phenomena, including the reliability of our moral beliefs and the patterns of moral convergence across cultures.

Important Books

G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) is the foundational text of modern meta-ethics. Its central arguments, the open question argument and the claim that "good" is a non-natural property, established the framework within which all subsequent debates about moral realism have taken place. The book is also a landmark in the development of analytic philosophy, exemplifying the method of conceptual analysis that would become the hallmark of the analytic tradition. Its influence extends beyond meta-ethics to normative ethics, where Moore's emphasis on the intrinsic value of beauty and personal relationships helped shape the value theory of the Bloomsbury Group.

Russ Shafer-Landau's Moral Realism: A Defence (2003) is the most comprehensive contemporary defense of non-naturalist moral realism. It addresses the central objections to the position, including the epistemological challenge, the queerness objection, and the problem of moral disagreement, with care and rigor. Shafer-Landau's argument that moral facts are analogous to mathematical facts is particularly influential, providing a model for how non-natural properties can be both real and knowable.

David Enoch's Taking Morality Seriously (2011) represents the cutting edge of contemporary moral realism. Its argument for robust realism, grounded in the indispensability of moral commitments to practical deliberation, has reinvigorated the debate and forced anti-realists to engage with the realist position on its own terms. Enoch's willingness to embrace the apparently counterintuitive consequences of his position, including the ontological commitment to irreducible moral facts, gives the book a distinctive philosophical personality.

Related Quotes

Moral realism has produced formulations that capture its central claims with particular force. Moore's declaration that "if I am asked, 'What is good?' my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter" expresses the non-naturalist conviction that moral properties are simple and irreducible. Shafer-Landau's observation that "moral facts are not natural facts, but they are no less real for that" distills the non-naturalist's commitment to objectivity without reduction. Enoch's claim that "we cannot deliberate without taking some things to be worth pursuing, and this commitment is not optional" articulates the indispensability argument that grounds his defense of realism. These formulations are not merely slogans; they identify the points at which the realist position is most vulnerable and most defensible, and they continue to shape the debate about the nature of truth and justice in moral life.

Related Topics

Moral realism connects directly to the question of knowledge and truth, because the realist's central claim is that there are moral truths that can be known. If moral facts exist independently of our beliefs, then the epistemological question of how we can access them becomes urgent. Moral realists have offered various answers, from Moore's appeal to intuition to Boyd's appeal to empirical theory-building, but all of them must explain how finite, fallible beings can come to know objective moral facts. This question is continuous with the broader philosophical question of how we can know anything that goes beyond our immediate experience, a question that has animated epistemology since Descartes and that remains as pressing in the moral domain as in any other.

Moral realism also connects to the understanding reality collection, because the realist's claim is ultimately a claim about what is real. If moral facts are objective, then reality includes not only physical objects and natural laws but also moral truths, facts about what is right and wrong, just and unjust. This is a striking claim, and it is one of the reasons that moral realism has been so controversial. To accept moral realism is to accept that the world is not just a system of physical causes but also a moral order, that the universe contains not only facts about what is but also facts about what ought to be. This does not require that the moral order be imposed from outside, by God or by Platonic Forms. It requires only that the moral facts be there, as part of reality, whether or not anyone recognizes them. Understanding this claim, and deciding whether to accept it, is essential to any honest attempt to understand the nature of reality and our place within it.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Moral Realism." A comprehensive scholarly reference covering the history, arguments, and central debates of moral realism, including the distinction between naturalism and non-naturalism.
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Moral Non-Naturalism." A detailed treatment of the non-naturalist tradition, from Moore through contemporary defenders like Shafer-Landau and Enoch.
3. G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). The foundational text of modern meta-ethics, introducing the open question argument and the concept of non-natural moral properties.
4. Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). The most systematic contemporary defense of non-naturalist moral realism.
5. David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). A robust defense of moral realism grounded in the indispensability of moral commitments.